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UPDATE: A newer post on Antarctica points out that there is a volcanic chain running under or near the parts of Antarctica that are warming or melting. The scientists and media forgot to mention…
The new-old scare is Antarctica and what a messy situation it is. Only two weeks ago Matthew England was saying that Ocean winds were keeping Antarctica cool, and that Antarctica was stealing Australian rain.
Now a new Cryosat study by Malcolm McMillan et al is generating headlines saying that Antarctic ice is “disappearing at twice the rate predicted”.[1] (Can someone calculate the date it will be all gone?)
Well, at least it’s worse now than it was all of three years ago when the new Cryosat data first started.
Now they finally can record “near continuous 96% coverage of the continent”, with “a fivefold increase in the sampling of coastal regions where the vast majority of all ice losses occur.” It’s good that we have better data, but these are very short trends. Who’s leaping to hit the panic button? If there is message here it’s that ice loss is a complicated beast; it isn’t just about temperature, but also about precipitation, ablation, and […]
Sir Isaac Newton
Peer review by anonymous unpaid reviewers is not a part of the Scientific Method.
Once upon a time the fate of a scientific paper was dependent on an Editor whose reputation depended on making sound decisions about what to publish. Modern science shifted responsibility from a single identifiable editor to an anonymous “committee”. What could possibly go wrong?
From Zocalo Public Square
Melinda Baldwin looked at the history of peer review:
I was incredibly surprised to learn that Nature published some papers without peer review up until 1973. In fact, many of the most influential texts in the history of science were never put through the peer review process, including Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity, and James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA.
A revolution in science happened without formal “peer review”. Who would have thought?
Crucially, journals without refereeing processes were not seen as inferior or less “scientific” than those that used referees. Few scientists thought that two anonymous readers would better judge a paper than, say, the great physicist Max Planck (who was on the editorial board of the prominent German journal […]
Photo by Geoff Sherrington
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Myeloma Cells | Wikimedia
This is another example of why I’m so passionate about getting research money out of dead-end efforts to change the weather and into medical research. The extraordinary news broke last week that the Mayo Clinic had used a genetically modified virus to cure treat one woman of metastasized and widely spread cancer – specifically myeloma. There are a lot of caveats, this research is quite risky, and it doesn’t apply to most people or most cancers, it is a proof of principle.
The potential for transformative medical breakthroughs is spectacular right now. Medicine is, after all, just an information game. The information is expensive but the material resources are dirt cheap — all the answers to the holy grail of the fountain of health are found in rearrangements of common elements — like the kind found in the dirt of a pot-plant. For the first time humanity has the tools to hunt and hammer out the information. If people knew what glittering marvels were within reach, they surely would want to channel our best and brightest and all our spare resources.
The main caveat here (a pretty big one) is that the trial had only […]
The Gallup poll results for May show the environment is not the most important issue for 97% of Americans. Golly, but those naming the environment as the top concern tripled from 1% – 3% from April to May. It’s a blip up in a long term trend that’s falling. H/t to Brietbart.com.
How many times do people need to tell politicians that being a skeptic isn’t the vote killer that some commentators would like you to believe? Even people who believe in man-made global warming just aren’t as concerned about the environment as they are about jobs, corruption, and the economy.
Which politician will make cleaning out corruption their trademark policy?
…
Where’s the balance?
According to some the media doesn’t report on climate often enough. But where’s the “balance” — if 97% of the public are more concerned about something else, perhaps the message should be something else?
For those all-knowing super intelligent beings who protest that the public won’t worry about the right things if you don’t tell them, we can only ask if 20 years of non-stop campaigns, reports, advertising, documentaries, and Nobel Prize winning (flawed) documentaries are enough?
9.7 out of 10 based on 70 […]
Rud Istvan has taken it upon himself to point out the diabolical dilemma the University of Queensland is facing. They have now claimed ownership of the work for the 97% Consensus paper (Cook et al 2013). In which case, UQ may have published a paper which breaches its own ethical principles (and is now threatening Brandon Shollenberger with legal action if he does what they themselves have already done). Alternately, if there was no ethical approval they are misrepresenting the situation with “grossly invalid grounds” and there is no reason to withhold data and threaten Shollenberger and the said data ought be released immediately.
The paper should be retracted or the data should be released to Richard Tol and Brandon Shollenberger. I would think an apology to Brandon, or to those named in the paper would also be a bare minimum requirement.
Jo
PS: As I said, the question of the participants names is a strawman. The real issue is the other data — like timestamps. Why are UQ risking their reputation to hide the other data (or lack thereof?)
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. Prof. Alistair McEwan Acting-Pro-Vice Chancellor University of QueenslandMr. Graham Lloyd Environmental Editor www.theaustralian.com.au ……………………………………….. Ms. Jane Malloch, Esq. […]
The Climate Debate Continues!
Professor Cliff Ollier, UWA and David Archibald, Author of “Twilight of Abundance”
Jo says: two Perth councils are drafting policies to cope with sea level rise right this minute. Cliff Ollier can set them straight with Rising sea Level Forecast: Fact or Fiction? Archibald’s book is subtitled: “Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short”. It’s excellent and fascinating. This man does not mince words. What else do you need to know?
Monday 26th May 7pm, Royal Perth Yacht Club, Australia II Drive, Crawley, Perth, more details below.
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Does the world owe Australia bezillions of dollars in carbon credits? With years of La Nina rainfall on arid outback Australia, “we” (or rather the citizen plants of Australia) have apparently been sucking down the CO2 at a phenomenal rate: “almost 60 per cent of carbon uptake attributed to Australian ecosystems.” But, sigh, call me unconvinced. I think what this paper demonstrates is that consensus and simulations are not worth much, and that we don’t know where global CO2 is going.
And anyway, the Australian outback vegetation explosion is ephemeral. While there may have been a lot of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere in 2011, as noted in the paper, it quickly gets oxidized and goes back into the atmosphere over the next year or two when the grasses and flowers die. So maybe hold off on those bezillions of dollars of carbon credits.
Global carbon markets turnover $50-180 billion a year with the aim of changing global carbon dioxide levels. (Yes, that’s what they say these markets are for.) But the brutal truth is that we are still guessing where exactly our carbon emissions end up. The consensus was that probably tropical forests were doing extra global sucking […]
The big news from this new study is no news — the public are more bored with climate change than ever, and the trend is down. The fever peaked in 2007, and the last great spike of interest was in late 2009 when ClimateGate finished it off. Though that’s not the way Anderegg sees it.
Anderegg infamously published the blacklist of scientists in PNAS, so we know he struggles with the scientific method. Here, flawed assumptions render the conclusions a wishful fantasy. Anderegg argues that ClimateGate was not a big deal, didn’t affect opinions much, and (yawn) climate scientists need to do better communication. He’s wrong. His study misses the major damage — by assuming that the public are a uniform block his research could never uncover that the real effects of ClimateGate were devastating and irreversible. The scandal changed the opinions that matter — those of the smart engaged thinkers and leaders. I noted at the time that ClimateGate had put a rocket under the layer of influential busy achievers like never before. Suddenly people who hadn’t taken much interest in the debate were fired into action by the fraud. The nodes of influence shifted — as I said […]
This is about data they don’t own, that wasn’t secure, is supposedly available, but they want to keep secret.
More bad news for the University of Queensland. The Australian discussed the issue of the bizarre threatening letter that UQ sent to Brandon Shollenberger when he contacted them to let them know he’d found some data one of their employees carelessly left unprotected lying around on the web. Now the acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor is trying to do damage-control by releasing a media statement, but he’s missed the chance to say the legal threat was a parody — with that easy escape gone, he’s defending the indefendable. Brandon has already responded on his site, arguing that the VC is “highly misleading”: the names of the surveyers are not important (and are also mostly known already), but time stamps, and missing papers are still unpublished, and UQ has not explained why they ought be concealed.
The UQ Statement (quoted below) also misses the point and in so many ways.
“The following is a statement from UQ acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alastair McEwan.
“Recent media coverage (The Australian, 17 March 2013) has stated that The University of Queensland […]
The strange case of the Greenpeace FOIA of David Legates (Hydroclimatology prof, and skeptic) at the University of Delaware (US)
The Delaware State Law says FOIAs only apply to things supported by state funding and David Legates didn’t receive any. That should make this story incredibly short, except that, as Jan Bilt explains: “For reasons administrators have declined to explain, a small portion of Legates’ teaching salary was, curiously, placed on the list of state-funded activity shortly before Greenpeace filed its FOIA request in 2009.” In the end a heavyweight, Lawrence White, at the Uni of Delaware leaned heavily on Legates to provide not just everything Greenpeace asked for, but virtually everything he’d ever done — his teaching notes, emails, even ones written on his own time, and on his personal computer. At the same time the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed FOIAs against three other people at the Uni of Delaware who had worked on IPCC reports. The same Lawrence White said simply “No” to those requests. When is a law a law, and when is it merely a tool to fulfill the personal wishes of those in high places? Apparently when it’s on a university campus.
Compare Legates […]
UPDATE: After I wrote this Brandon published the letter in full and raised some provocative questions. (See below)
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What bad news for The University of Queensland. Their entire legal staff were on holiday at the same time and this eminent university was protected only by a Law & Society 101 student who staffed the overnight service of FreeLegalAidOnline. A mockfest is ensuing across the Internet. It is so unfair.
A year ago John Cook published another 97% study (the magic number that all consensuses must find). It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (see Anthony Watts view). Cook’s work is obviously impeccable (except for the part about 97% being really 0.3%), but evidently it uses a special new kind of “open data”. The exact date and time each anonymized reviewer reviewed a sacred scientific abstract is commercial and must be kept secret. These volunteer reviewers allegedly stand to, er … lose a lot of money if that data is revealed (they won’t be employed again for no money?). Such is the importance of this that the University of Queensland left the data on secret-secret forum protected by no passwords and then put […]
Finally, some coverage of the massive amount of money pumping the Big-Green agenda. What is really so remarkable about this is that skeptics are winning, despite the fact that the greens have almost all the institutional, academic, government, and big-media support, and far, far more money. All we have is truth and wits.
The Washington Examiner
Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil
Ron Arnold
Mainstream reporters appear not to be aware of the component parts that comprise Big Green: environmentalist membership groups, nonprofit law firms, nonprofit real estate trusts (The Nature Conservancy alone holds $6 billion in assets), wealthy foundations giving prescriptive grants, and agenda-making cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association. They each play a major socio-political role.
Seeing Big-Green funding means taking a broader view of the money trail:
Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.
That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive […]
Bill Nye thinks science is about opinion polls — not about reason and evidence, and John Oliver (who’s he? A British/US comedian) thought they should take that fallacy and run with it.
Oliver couldn’t quite sort out his opinion polls from his facts. He seemed to think that when believers do key-word surveys of abstracts it’s “a fact”, but when 75 million Americans are skeptical of a theory (which only has key-word surveys to back it up) “who gives a s***?”
He goes on to say: “You don’t need people’s opinions on a fact”. Except the “fact” in question is just some other people’s opinions. Obviously what matters to him is not the number of people who believe something, but whether they are card carrying members of the right club. After all only 62 climate scientists actually reviewed the chapter that mattered in the 2007 IPCC report, but some 31,000 scientists, including 9,000 PhD’s, 49 NASA scientists and 4 Apollo astronauts, and 2 Nobel Physics Prize winners disagree. Other surveys show that skeptics are older, better with numbers and smarter. Two thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics. The obvious conclusion (if you think surveys matter in science, which I […]
Lennart Bengtsson joined the GWPF only two weeks ago. He’s a very well respected Swedish leading climate scientist. But he’s been put under — as he describes it — unbearable pressure to quit. Steve McIntyre calls it a fatwa.
What an extraordinarily raw letter:
Dear Professor Henderson,
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.
I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
Three years ago I made the case for dumping renewables, and doubling medical research — and both occurred in last night’s budget. (Yes, I hear the cry that this is just more big-government funded bad-science, bear with me, I’ll get to that). First let me bask in the glory (wink).
I’m especially proud of the Op-Ed I wrote in The Weekend Australian in May 2011. Indeed it’s very much my driving mission — to redirect corrupted and wasteful tax funds towards better uses, and to help four year olds with cancer, and all the other variants of human pain.
It’s big biccies… The Abbott Government is setting up a 20 billion dollar medical research future fund, which is expected to distribute $1 billion to research annually by 2022-23. It’s being claimed it is the largest in the world (I am not entirely convinced, but nonetheless, it’s radically big). We currently spend about $800m a year on medical research, so this would really double it. (Spooky).
But I can feel the barbs of skeptical libertarians already — saying the money should have been used to pay off the debt or returned to the people who earned it — and I’m […]
UPDATE: The bottom line. Meh.People are calling it “brutal”, and saying it’s a slash and burn budget, but really government spending will only shrunk by 0.5% of GDP.
[The Guardian] “The government is cutting overall spending, but relatively slowly – from 25.3% of GDP to 24.8% next year, 24.7% in 2016-17 and rising to 24.8% again in 2017-18. By comparison Peter Costello’s first budget was much more savage, cutting government spending from 25.1% to 23.9% of GDP.”
The Australian 2014/15 Budget has just been released. It’s the first budget of the Abbott government. (Catallaxy has the transcript of the speech). Given election cycles there will probably not be a better opportunity to move towards a smaller, less burdensome government. Are the cuts enough? [UPDATE: No].
How much unnecessary tithing is there to the carbon monster?
There are some good signs: 16,500 public service jobs will be cut. And “70 government agencies will be scrapped or merged” including the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). Depressingly, while this is useful, it’s not much. There are apparently so many government agencies no one can figure out the exact number. There are estimates it’s close to 1000.
UPDATE: From News.com […]
The Satirical Times
Mother Nature has issued a disguised voluntary recall notice for Arctic Treemometers. Sold as a way of measuring temperatures over the last two millennium, they turned out to fail frequently, even going against trends in most other thermometers in the last half century. The flaw has been quietly recognized for years, but is rarely mentioned in polite circles.
Critics wonder why it took Mother Nature so long to issue the recall and why it is so qualified and partial. They point out that these safety warnings only seem to appear when product salesmen are also offering a repair kit for sale too.
In this case Stine and Huybers tell us they can fix the “divergence” problem with treemometers by considering incoming light. Treemometers are failing, they say, because of global dimming and inconvenient volcanoes. As long as sunlight reaches trees the treemometers work. (Critics dryly reply that it’s hardly news that sunlight affects tree growth, and that they never bought the tree-ring data in any case.)
Meanwhile Mann-made Treemometers Inc issued a statement in 4-point Roman Half-Uncial script at 3am saying that their Treemometers are as accurate as ever in all locations where cloud cover, […]
A miracle has occurred, climate models which have been plagued with failure and have finally been gifted with The Scientific Truth. Apparently the God of Weather has visited upon Matthew England and others. (We wonder why God didn’t visit earlier, but are grateful for this insight.)
The climate models didn’t predict Antarctic sea ice extent trends. Polar amplification was supposed to mean it would warm twice as fast at the poles, yet inconveniently after years of massive output of CO2 — above the levels assumed in the models — Antarctic sea ice has hit another record high. Finally in the eighth round of making excuses for their excuses, the Scientific Truth has emerged to sweep away the scientific untruths that went before. (After all, climate models couldn’t possibly have been expected to understand heat flow around the planet could they?)
The yellow line shows how much rain Antarctica is stealing and dumping as sea ice. If you turn on your tumble drier the penguins in Antarctica have to walk further.
Ocean winds keep Antarctica cold, Australia dry Science Daily May 11, 2014 Source: Australian National University
New research has explained why Antarctica is not warming as much as […]
Photo by Geoff Sherrington | Click to enlarge
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