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Mark the moment. This is unusual.
Firstly, it’s not just anyone, but Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, personality, and potential Tory leader in the UK. (He’s got so much potential several Tories in safe seats have offered to resign to let him run.) Secondly, he’s confident, brazen and unapologetic. There are not many of the usual duck-and-cover caveats (only lip-service ones), and no bowing to the bullies who will call him names rather than discuss the ideas.
It’s snowing, and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age Something is up with our winter weather. Could it be the Sun is having a slow patch?
Telegraph Jan 20th 2013
As a species, we human beings have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands — when the reality is that everything, or almost everything, depends on the behaviour and caprice of the gigantic thermonuclear fireball around which we revolve.
No doubt Johnson will be accused of “ignoring the longer trend” because he talks about the last five years of cold cold winters, but beneath his discussion of just how unusually heavy the snow is […]
Who said scientific experts should be trusted?
Is corruption endemic? Fully 43% of retractions in the life science and medical research journals are due to fraud or suspected fraud.
Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications
Ferric C. Fang R. Grant Steen and Arturo Casadevall
PNAS PNAS 2012 109 (42) 16751-16752; doi:10.1073/iti4212109
Abstract
A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction announcements have led to a previous underestimation of the role of fraud in the ongoing retraction epidemic. The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975. Retractions exhibit distinctive temporal and geographic patterns that may reveal underlying causes.
Plus this published correction.
RetractionWatch points out that this could be the tip of the iceberg
The question, of course, is, how common is scientific misconduct? The simple but unsatisfying answer is that we don’t know, certainly not based on this study, because it’s […]
I would like to see what was on the Science Fraud site. The only parts left seem eminently admirable. Apparently in just six months, the site received anonymous tips documenting suspicious results in over 300 papers. Some of those papers were subsequently retracted.
Wherever there are big dollars, big-corruption follows. Whaddayaknow? Sadly, science is just like any other human endeavor. For every site reporting science fraud that is shut down, may ten alternatives spring forth.
Libertyblitzkrieg.com says “We need more sites like this not less.”
Bill Frezza describes what is known about the site’s demise on Forbes.
A Barrage Of Legal Threats Shuts Down Whistleblower Site, Science Fraud
Those of us concerned about the decaying credibility of Big Science were dismayed to learn that the whistleblower site Science Fraud has been shut down due to a barrage of legal threats against its operator. With billions of dollars in federal science funding hinging on the integrity of academic researchers, and billions more in health care dollars riding on the truthfulness of pharmaceutical research claims, the industry needs more websites like this, not fewer.
Regular readers of Retraction Watch, a watchdog site run by two medical reporters, got the news along with […]
Ive been away this week in Augusta (hence the gaps in posts). Driving back. This is the most south west point where the Indian Ocean meets the Great Southern. Have enjoyed the Blackwood river and canoes. Jo
7.9 out of 10 based on 36 ratings
Following in the heatwave theme… William Kinninmonth points out that the long term data on the red hot centre of Australia shows that this January is not unusual. – Jo.
__________________________________ Letter to the Editor of The Australian
A pattern of extreme weather should not be confused with climate change.
The recent heat wave across much of Central Australia and its occasional extension east and south is a pattern of extreme weather. Climate is the recurring patterns of weather that inure us to such extremes. The climate of Alice Springs is exemplified by 1887, the previously hottest January with an average maximum of 40.7oC. The extreme, nearly 5oC above the long term January average, was made possible by a spell of 11 days over 40oC, a brief respite then another 10 days over 40oC.
Climate change, of course, is a persisting significant departure from the experienced pattern of weather. The current pattern of extreme weather is not outside the envelope of experience that describes Central Australian climate.
William Kininmonth
William Kininmonth headed Australia‘s National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology from 1986 to 1998.
PS: You may […]
The media are in overdrive, making out that “the extreme heat is the new normal” in Australia. The Great Australian Heatwave of January 2013 didn’t push the mercury above 50C at any weather station in Australia, yet it’s been 50C (122F) and hotter in many inland towns across Australia over the past century. See how many are in the late 1800’s and early to mid 1900’s. You can’t blame those high records on man made global warming. [feel free to post some old records of your own and the source reference we can check and we will update the map]
Did CO2 cause extreme heat in the 1820’s?
In explorer Charles Sturt’s time it was so hot that thermometers exploded. Was this Australia’s hottest day all the way back in 1828? It was 122F or 53.9C! Naturally it is not a BOM-registered-record (the BOM did not exist then). Nonetheless, Charles Sturt was engaged to explore the nation and given careful instructions to take accurate readings of the climate. Yes, inadequate thermometer shading may have exaggerated the maximum by 1C, 2C, maybe even 3C, but at 50.9C it would still have been considerably hotter than anywhere in January 2013.
Even […]
Maxwell Szulc
As Greens blame coal miners and SUV drivers for contributing to firestorms that destroy houses, ponder that one man tried to reduce the risk of fires and cleared firebreaks on his property in WA in 2011 and is currently in jail for it, serving a 15 month sentence. Most of the cleared land had been cleared before in 1970 or 1983. This was mere scrubby regrowth. He was trying to separate his property from DEC (Dept of Environment and Conservation) managed land with a 20m wide fire-break. He is due out of jail sometime around Feb 10th, though his government minders have not even fixed that date (are they having trouble calculating “15 months”?) He had previously been jailed for three months in 2010 for a similar action.
This was true civil disobedience. He knew what would happen. He felt someone had to protest and I gather he felt that at 62 and without children or a wife to support, it was his duty.
Szulc cleared his land as a protest. He was in contempt of court, he is in contempt of the DEC.
Some will say that Maxwell Szulc is technically not in jail for clearing […]
Joint Post: Jo Nova and James Doogue
The UK Met Office are completely impartial about global warming, and delighted that things are not going to warm as fast as they thought. So to draw attention to the good news they waited to release it on the … quietest possible news-day of the year. Oh. But remembering that they are public servants, they had to settle for the second quietest, and release it on the day before Christmas instead.
These are the people who said the science was settled, and the deniers were wrong, except that it wasn’t and they weren’t.
Unfortunately for the Met boys, the skeptics noticed (h/t Tallbloke and Richard Smith), and now, not only do they have to handle the heat of that partial reversal , now they also have to admit the cheap PR trick backfired — they were caught in a cowardly attempt to hide the news. Busted. See Bob Tisdale here for very nice graphs.
Graph from The Australian. (Don’t blame me for the decadel’s – sic)
This has been picked up now by Daily Mail, GWPF, Delingpole, The National Post (Canada) and this weekend, The Australian.
Daily Mail
“To put it […]
PR is more important than anything else to the Greens. When Johnathon Moylan fraudulently tricked investors, costing some of them thousands of dollars, Green leaders praise him for “drawing attention” to something. It’s as if stupid punters are so dumb and Green’s brains so Omniscient, that any crime is forgiven in the quest to tell the world a green “fact”. Did Christine Milne think Australians don’t know the Greens blame coal miners for hot days? Did she think that people would hear for the first time that Greens really really don’t like the coal industry and they would suddenly awaken from their stupor and be converts to the cause? Did she think if Green chicanery raised the cost of capital formation in the coal industry, causing that industry to suffer, that everyone else would overlook Green illegality and applaud?
A delusional anti-coal mining activist, Jonathan Moylan, impersonated a bank spokesman and issued a fake media release, falsely declaring that the bank had withdrawn a $1.2 billion loan facility from Whitehaven Coal because of ”unacceptable damage to the environment.” He created a dummy email inbox to push the deceit further to cause real damage. The story was picked up by some […]
The American Geophysical Union – can it be saved?
Seriously: the 2012 Convention included Mann, Gleick, Lewandowsky, Oreskes and Cook.
If you are one of the 58,000 members, you could ask yourself if you want to be aligned to an organization that thinks “science” means sometimes you need to impersonate someone else, steal their documents, and hide your own data. Is it AGU science if you use algorithms so badly that you could replace your data with a phone book and produce the same result? What if your data is used upside down? The AGU thinks you should speak twice.
Is it the AGU’s idea of “rigorous” if you make headlines out of irreproducible results that use flawed samples, fake data, and issue a press release months before your paper is even ready to be published? Is a sample size of ten in a self-selecting internet poll enough to publish a paper? Do you find out the opinions of one group by interviewing the people who hate them, but then present the results as if you surveyed the first group? Is it OK to call people who disagree with you insulting names? John Cook does, and he was invited […]
BREAKING:All the files from Working Group II of AR5 are now available just as “ahem” the open-and-transparent-IPCC would want them. There are 661 files amongst 1 gigabyte of material. This includes their meeting in Japan, in Jan 2011 and a year later in San Francisco, and then Buenos Aires, 10 weeks ago.
Leaked — Working Group II drafts
Behind the scenes Donna Laframboise finds that there is a layer of aggressive activists who are privvy to the IPCC drafts process, and actively lobbying. WWF are pushing the IPCC to cite the WWF. They helped create Himalaya-gate where the IPCC ridiculously predicted the end of the massive Himalayan glaciers by 2035, and got caught embarrassingly. Donna’s book showed that “two thirds of the chapters in the 2007 IPCC report included among their personnel, at least one individual linked to the WWF. One third of the chapters were led by an WWF-affiliated author.” Apparently nothing much has changed.
Donna Laframboise writes:
My 2011 book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, documents the IPCC’s numerous credibility problems. Among these is the disturbing influence of green activists on what is supposed to be a rigorous […]
Pay up, or we’ll turn you into a Hobbit! This is what our public science establishment has reduced itself to?
Science fiction writers have infiltrated universities. They’re running amok, and while it’s all very entertaining (thanks for the laughs) some poor sods (like The Express) might think this is actually science.
Mass extinction forecast with 6C temperature rise
HUMANS will have to become like Hobbits to survive the rapid climate change facing the world, a report claims today.
It says that in the past species have coped with a warming climate by turning to dwarfism.This is because food is less nutritious in a warmer world which means that species have to eat more – and by becoming smaller they can cope with food scarcity.The report published by the Climate News Network also warns that the speed of climate change could lead to mass extinctions partly because many species, form plants to animals, will not have time to adapt.It is based on the work of an international group of 30 scientists looking at the vast fossil deposits in rock strata in Wyoming in the United States, charting the period 55 million years ago when the earth temperature rose suddenly.
One of […]
Assume for a moment that the ABC was a dedicated team working to serve the public, getting fair rates of pay. Then imagine Australians asked the ABC what salaries they paid their “celebrities”. The ABC team would be happy to provide that list, and surely it could be done in one working day.
Instead the national broadcaster has been hiding those details for two years and has just lost the second appeal. (How much money has it cost to hide the money ABC presenters get?) The ABC gets $1 billion a year from the people of Australia, and it has refused to disclose the details of its $25 million dollar “contractors and consultants” bill, and the salaries of top staff of shows like Media Watch, Four corners, and Mornings with John Faine.
A Freedom of Information request was lodged more than two years ago by the Herald and Weekly Times, seeking access to documents “dealing with salaries, or any payments” paid to program makers working on 13 programs, including those listed above, for the financial year ending 2010.
The BBC was caught paying presenters through personal service companies which allowed those presenters to pay less tax. (Are these the same […]
Since when was science “political?” Answer: It’s not, but the institutions and bureaucrats who pretend to be scientists are. In the past, partisan scientists would at least try to hide that and keep up the dispassionate persona that marks a seeker of the truth. Now some scientists wear their bias like a badge.
How do we stop the politicisation of science? Not this way. Daniel Sarewitz argues (weakly) in Nature that we need scientists of both political sides in “expert” panels:
The US scientific community must decide if it wants to be a Democratic interest group or if it wants to reassert its value as an independent national asset. If scientists want to claim that their recommendations are independent of their political beliefs, they ought to be able to show that those recommendations have the support of scientists with conflicting beliefs. Expert panels advising the government on politically divisive issues could strengthen their authority by demonstrating political diversity. The National Academies, as well as many government agencies, already try to balance representation from the academic, non-governmental and private sectors on many science advisory panels; it would be only a small step to be equally explicit about ideological or political diversity. […]
… 🙂
6.8 out of 10 based on 32 ratings
Imagine the hyperventilating headlines: Global warming denier sells TV channel to Arab Oil organisation, pockets $100 million in oil funds. More proof that giant corporate interests pull the strings on the public debate, and that carbon dioxide causes storms, tidal waves, asteroids, and alien attacks!
Skip the Global Hypocrisy Award for 2013 – don’t even bother sending in entries. It’s over.
Al Gore has campaigned for two decades against the evil vice-like grip that fossil fuel polluters have on the media and politics ““The carbon fuels industry — big oil and coal — have a 50-year lease on the Republican Party” (H/t The Telegraph). So the obvious step was for him to spend seven years building a TV empire in order to sell it to an organisation founded, funded and fused with Big Oil.
Al Gore apparently owned about 20% of Current TV (you’ve never heard of it either, right?).
He’s just sold it to Al Jazeera for half a billion: thus giving the Qatari Royal Family more access to US audiences and earning himself a hundred million or so.
But of course, he really didn’t have a choice, the other large offer coming in was from something far […]
Bradshaw Art, Kimberley, Australia. This distinctive style of painting disappeared 7,000 years ago. | Photo TimJN1
Two million years of climate change has made us human — in a ying meets yang contradiction, while climate change destroyed cultures and groups, without it, we would not be who we are. The brutal forces of Nature tested our ancestors with droughts, storms, floods and tidal surges, but if the climate had stayed the same, would we have had Bach, Leonardo, and Newton?
At the end of the day, we have a civilization that allows millions of people to pursue happiness without fear that they will die of dysentery, be murdered by marauding barbarians, or lose their children to slave traders.
We are the lucky bastards at the end of a long line of poor sods who struggled and suffered to stay one step ahead of the reaper.
Here are two stories of studies that suggest dramatic effects of climate change on long lost peoples. The second, below, may finally explain the disappearance of the mysterious well developed aboriginal artform known as the “Bradshaw” style.
Rapid changes occurred 2 million years ago
Some swings occurred so fast they happened in “hundreds of […]
Jan 2 or 3 (depending on where you are).
6 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
Goodbye to the Kyoto protocol.
How well did those ambitious plans work out? The government solution that aimed to reduce CO2 emissions by 5% achieved a 58% increase instead. Welcome to Case-Study #224 in Government failure.
Kyoto climate change treaty sputters to a sorry end
“The controversial and ineffective Kyoto Protocol’s first stage comes to an end today, leaving the world with 58 per cent more greenhouse gases than in 1990, as opposed to the five per cent reduction its signatories sought.
From the beginning, the treaty that was adopted in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, was problematic.
To reduce Greenhouse emissions: ditch the Kyoto protocol
Without Kyoto the US reduced emissions | Graph: Forbes
The big success story in reducing emissions has nothing to do with nanny-state hope-n-change regulation. The US reduced its emissions by 4% in a single year largely because they shifted from coal to gas.
“As a result of increasing use of gas to make electricity, the market share of coal has declined from 48% in 2008 to 43% in 2011 and likely 37% in 2012. Natural gas will capture approximately 30% of electric generation market share this year, sharply up from 12% in 1990 and […]
Cartoonist John Spooner gets away with saying in text what no one else has said before in The Age: that the skeptics are clawing their way ahead, and winning.
The tide has shifted.
Some excerpts:
WELL, so much for the 2012 apocalypse. If the ancient Mayans ever knew anything about the future, they made a serious miscalculation. The same fate has befallen the international climate change emergency brigade. About $1 billion and 18 “Kyoto” meetings later, the world has agreed to do nothing much more than meet again.
How did this frightening climate threat dissolve into scientific uncertainty and political confusion? What of the many billions of dollars of wasted public resources? Some might blame the “sceptics”, the “merchants of doubt” or the “deniers”. Others point to the global financial crisis.
We can say for certain that many hesitant individuals overcame the pressures of group-think, intimidation and tribal disapproval to have a closer look at the relationship between real science, politics and business.
You don’t need a PhD to get the basic elements: 8.4 out of 10 based on 105 ratings […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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