It’s just another scientific study doomed to disappear
A Norwegian whaler paid for 2,200 aerial photos of East Antarctica in 1937. Since then humankind has emitted 91% of all the emissions we’ve ever produced and the world is facing an extinction level catastrophe and yet satellite photos show this 2,000 kilometer long section of East Antarctica hasn’t changed — or at least, not in any way related to our uptake of coal power or planes, trains, airconditioners and cars. Basically the human race emitted 1,600 billion tons of carbon dioxide which was supposed to warm the poles twice as fast as anywhere else, but there is still nothing to see here.
Using hundreds of old aerial photographs dating back to 1937, combined with modern computer technology, the researchers have tracked the evolution of glaciers in East Antarctica. The area covers approximately 2,000 kilometers of coastline and contains as much ice as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet.
Compared to modern data, the ice flow speeds are unchanged. While some glaciers have thinned over shorter intermediate periods of 10–20 years, they have remained stable or grown slightly in the long term, indicating a system in balance.
A Existing historical glacier reconstructions (Byrd11, Moider32 and Peninsula31) and glaciers included in this study (frontal reconstructions n = 21, elevation reconstructions n = 12, velocity reconstructions n = 4), overlaid on 2003–2021 Antarctic annual elevation change from Smith et al5., with MEaSUREs basin72
Imagine the fuss if these old photos showed a glacier melting?
Most of the images used in the study were captured during a 1937 expedition organized and paid for by Norwegian whaler Lars Christensen. The mission aimed to produce the first maps of this part of East Antarctica, but the maps were never published due to the German invasion of Norway. Since then, the images have been stored at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø and forgotten.
When the researchers from the University of Copenhagen read about the expedition, they realized that valuable images were likely hidden in an archive in Norway. They traveled to Tromsø and reviewed all 2,200 images taken during the expedition. They supplemented the Norwegian aerial images with images of the same glaciers from Australian surveys conducted between 1950 and 1974.
B Taylor glacier in 1937, 1956, and 1973 as captured in the aerial images. Close up shows the different types of fiducial marks used for standardizing the internal image geometry. C Produced digital elevation models (DEM) overlain on orthomosaics generated from interpolated DEMs. For the productions of the 1956 DEM and orthomosaic we included additional oblique images (not included here) as the glacier was photographed with a trimetrogon camera setup.
During the last few decades, several sectors in Antarctica have transitioned from glacial mass balance equilibrium to mass loss. In order to determine if recent trends exceed the scale of natural variability, long-term observations are vital. Here we explore the earliest, large-scale, aerial image archive of Antarctica to provide a unique record of 21 outlet glaciers along the coastline of East Antarctica since the 1930s. In Lützow-Holm Bay, our results reveal constant ice surface elevations since the 1930s, and indications of a weakening of local land-fast sea-ice conditions. Along the coastline of Kemp and Mac Robertson, and Ingrid Christensen Coast, we observe a long-term moderate thickening of the glaciers since 1937 and 1960 with periodic thinning and decadal variability. In all regions, the long-term changes in ice thickness correspond with the trends in snowfall since 1940. Our results demonstrate that the stability and growth in ice elevations observed in terrestrial basins over the past few decades are part of a trend spanning at least a century, and highlight the importance of understanding long-term changes when interpreting current dynamics.
And for those who want to see the ebb and flow here are the detailed graphs of those 21 glaciers. Click to enlarge. It’s obvious that without long term data and climate models that work (which can predict precipitation) we have no chance of predicting glacier growth or loss, and nor should we infer long term prophesies from 20 or 30 year short cycles. Even 85 years of somewhat minimal data shows there is a lot of variation, and none of it apparently related in any obvious way to man made CO2 emissions.
Mads Dømgaard et al, Early aerial expedition photos reveal 85 years of glacier growth and stability in East Antarctica, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48886-x
The New Zealand government has been accused of waging a “war on nature” after it announced sweeping cuts to climate action projects, while making no significant new investments in environmental protection or climate crisis-related policy.
But absent from the budget documents was any meaningful new spending on the climate crisis. Instead, dozens of climate-related initiatives, including programmes in the Emissions Reductions Plan and funding for data and evidence specialists were subject to sweeping cuts.
Notice how the critics are all so vague. Their big fear, and worst threat, is some unfashionable place called “backwards”:
The Labour opposition called the budget a “catastrophe” that was “taking us backwards”.
For some reason the opposition did not say “Lord help us, The NZ government will warm the world!” Mostly because it sounds too stupid to lay the point of all these policies right out there. I mean, as if they can say that cancelling the Māori knowledge-based approaches to agricultural emissions will cause more floods in 2070?
And in the end a warmer world isn’t exactly scary to New Zealanders like Ebola, poverty or an armed invasion. Be afraid, you’ll get more beach weather!
The awful truth is that climate policies are just a fashion contest, so when they are taken away, the main downside is namecalling and a curse on your grandchildren. Like making witches angry or something?
Green party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick described the government as a “coalition of cowards” that was allowing the climate crisis to “rage on unchallenged” and whose attack on the climate would ripple through future generations. “The other day, government parties said, ‘drill, baby, drill,’ and today, they may as well have said, ‘burn, baby, burn’,” Swarbrick said…
Getting to the nitty gritty, this all sounds good. The new right leaning coalition has found good savings in troughing bureaucracies and flag waving green clubs. Amazing how fast these things breed:
$10million of funding has been scaled back for the Accelerator Wood Processing Growth Fund which supports wood processing capacity.
MBIE’s Circular Economy and Bioeconomy Strategy work is being stopped ‘as it is considered a low-value programme when compared with other work on climate change.’
$38 million is being cut from MBIE’s Energy portfolio programmes, including scaling down the Community Renewable Energy fund, and the Support for Energy Education in Communities Programme. It also includes discontinuing work on the Energy Emissions Reporting Scheme and cutting funding for small-scale distributed renewable energy and demand response systems.
$10million is being cut from MBIE’s Just Transitions programme.
Funding for the Climate Change Commission is being decreased by $15 million, including axing funding for the Commission’s agricultural emissions policy advisory function.
The budget includes a $35million reduction in climate change programmes including reducing funding for:
the Climate Change Development Fund
Climate Resilience for Māori initiative
Climate Change Chief Executives Board
implementation of the Carbon Neutral Government Programme
Climate Data Infrastructure
Enabling a Scaled-up, High Quality Voluntary Carbon Market
Cuts are being made to evidence and data functions, with less spending on consultants, external agencies, and specialists that supply evidence and data services ‘including updates to environmental standards, monitoring, reporting, policy work and science assurance.’
Additionally, as was well signalled early by Government, the budget confirms the axing of the Clean vehicle discount, saving $10 million.
The new government will instead toss more funds at “climate resilience” and “disaster response”, which means adapting to the climate they already have.
But there is so much further to go: $2.6 billion of climate initiatives will roll over from previous the Climate Emergency Response Fund (CERF) set up by the previous government. So there will still be money wasted on EV chargers, electric buses, emissions measurement schemes, and foreign aid to dictators. It will take years to unwind the climate grift.
And when the Coalition are asked what they are doing for the climate, they point to the “climate resilience” funds instead of calling it pagan witchcraft and asking for hard observable evidence that CO2 causes any problem at all. Have those UN committees ever been audited? Let’s set up a team to do that. I mean, if we care about the environment and the third world, we need climate models that work, right? No more of these unverified guesses.
The monster called “climate change turbulence” is an imaginary phantom
At any moment there are something like 10,000 boxes cruising in the air that know when they strike turbulence. Rumors are that these are even staffed with sentient beings. If Climate Change was making turbulence worse, you’d think pilots would have noticed? But instead of reporting what pilots said, which is that nothing has changed, almost all the media coverage about turbulence comes from models or cherry picked reanalysis of angels dancing at 197 hectopascals over the North Atlantic.
The European Space Agency even puts sensors on planes. With 40 million flights per year, tracked by radar and monitored by satellite, and reported by pilots as well, if there were trends in clear air turbulence on passenger planes, there would be a mountain of data, and we’d hear all about it. Instead all they have are modeled guesstimates and slightly worse conditions over the North Atlantic.
Pilots report that incidents of air turbulence are the same now as they always were
Paul Homewood has found the US National Transportation Safety Board Report, and actual pilot reports (PIREP data). Basically, in thirty years of flights and after more than half of mankinds total fossil fueled emissions have been emitted, there’s no trend at all.
To be fair, it could just be that we’re getting better at predicting turbulence so pilots are better at avoiding it. But if we’re going to headline newspapers with scary stories of flight turbulence (and if we actually care about people) the most important data might be the stuff that comes from planes.
The Australian ABC blamed it all on the Ogre du Jour:
They found a Professor Troy Todd Lane at Melbourne Uni who talks about studies which come from Reading University. One found more clear air turbulence over the North Atlantic in the last 40 years. But it also found less turbulence over South East Asia (see the figure from Prosser el al below). Using Believer-Correlation-Science — if climate change causes more turbulence, then it also causes less. Looks like extra emissions of CO2 saved lives on the Singapore Airlines flight. By the same reasoning, burn oil and protect planes in South East Asia? Clearly the ABC team didn’t look at the paper, and also clearly, they didn’t ask Prof Lane any difficult questions. What do we pay them or him for — witchcraft? “See the tea-leaves on the map…”
Furthermore, when the ABC says “our most common flight paths” (headlined above) they’re not talking about our Australian flights. Who is this “our”?
It’s like there is no world outside the North Atlantic.
The change in ERA5’s 197 hPa annual-mean diagnostic-mean moderate-or-greater (MOG) clear-air turbulence (CAT) probability over 1979–2020, showing (a) the absolute change and (b) the relative change. The changes are diagnosed from the linear trend. Stippling indicates statistical significance at the p = 0.05 level, according to a two-sided Wald test (Fahrmeir et al., 2022) applied to the absolute change. | Prosser et al
The Prosser et al paper was deceptively headlined “Evidence for Large Increases in Clear-Air Turbulence Over the Past Four Decades” but it could as easily have said the opposite. They dismissed the pilot reports with barely one line:
Pilot reports (PIREPs) have a longer record, but are not quantitative, and the geographical distribution of CAT based on PIREPs is limited in spatial and temporal extent (Wolff & Sharman, 2008). — Prosser et al 2023
Supposedly the point of the Prosser paper was to help aircraft and passengers, but actual reports from pilots: “who cares?”
A 2017 study predicted that severe turbulence will become two to three times more common over the North Atlantic by 2050-2080 because of climate change. However, the same study predicted a smaller increase of 50 per cent for severe turbulence over Australia.
Right there in the abstract, the 2017 paper admits its all games with calculators — no data needed
Reading Uni has a lot to answer for. One of the most prominent scientists pushing predictions of turbulent doom is Paul Williams, who wrote the 2017 paper and at least two further ones. He predicted a 55% rise in air turbulence over the North Atlantic. But Rupa Subramanya in The Free Press, writes that extra data wiped out the trend:
In 2017, he co-authored a study that received a lot of attention, because it predicted that a rise in atmospheric CO2 could double, or even triple, incidences of severe clear air turbulence. He also published a much-publicized paper in 2022 arguing that wind speed changes over the North Atlantic had increased in the last few decades—the basis for arguing that clear air turbulence will get worse. And in another widely reported paper, published in 2023, Williams predicted a 55 percent increase in clear air turbulence over the North Atlantic.
But how solid is his link between clear air turbulence and climate change? Earlier this year, Williams co-authored a letter to the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, which walked back the findings of his 2022 paper. If we include new data, the letter explained, the increase in wind speeds above the North Atlantic ceases to be “statistically significant.”
Where were the headlines New data shows the professor was wrong?
Climate models will be useful when they figure out convection, clouds, rain, humidity, storms…
Professor Lane says most of the turbulence in the tropical regions comes from thunderstorms, which are intensely more intense I tell you.
He lives by a kindergarten climate rule where “energy = catastrophe”, thus:
“With a warmer atmosphere, the atmosphere can hold more water, which can lead to those most intense thunderstorms being more intense with climate change. As those thunderstorms become more intense, they can also generate more intense turbulence.”
Except that the biggest-storms-of-all are not more intense. Since the Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Energy Index started in 1970 CO2 has risen from an ideal 325ppm to an apocalytic 425ppm and the global population has doubled. Fifty years of reckless “pollution” have been and gone and yet cyclones are still the same?
Prof Lane doesn’t appear to realize the water vapor hasn’t made it to the upper troposphere and even if it had, “more energy” is not always a disaster. There’s not as much energy in Antarctica, but no one wants to live there, and we hear they still have storms.
Details matter. The lower troposphere has gained water vapor from the ocean as the system warmed, but it hasn’t increased in the upper troposphere where the modelers desperately need it to rise (and where those planes fly). The extra water vapor means the amount of energy held in the air is larger, but does that mean convection has increased or become more stable? After all, it’s not the total energy that creates instability, it’s the difference between two regions that causes the chaos.
REFERENCE
Prosser et al (2023) Evidence for Large Increases in Clear-Air Turbulence Over the Past Four Decades, 08 June 2023, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL103814
Williams, P.D. Increased light, moderate, and severe clear-air turbulence in response to climate change. Adv. Atmos. Sci.34, 576–586 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-017-6268-2
The big sunspot cluster that created the auroras a few weeks ago is very likely just over the horizon on the sun, and it appears to have spat out a doozy of an X2.9 flare to announce its return. While we can’t see the sunspot cluster itself yet, astronomers estimate that it is the same angry AR3664 set that has been circling across the far side of the sun for the last two weeks. This hyperactive region launched the X class flares that produced auroras on May 10th that were so powerful they lit up the skies far from the poles in Florida and Queensland.
The global climate models agree that the effect of the solar-magnetic-wind and electric-field is exactly 0.0 degrees (per doubling of their NSF grants).
Some very active sunspots may last for months and each full rotation of the sun takes 27 days, so it may do a few laps and we may get more bites at this cherry. Or, if the sun is particularly grumpy, it may get more bites at us.
As the sun rotates we’ll see more of what is probably AR3664, though to confuse things, when it rolls over the horizon it will promptly get a new number-name. (It has and is now “AR13697”). It’s difficult to track what happens to every sunspot cluster as they travel across the far side of the sun, so all sunspots shifting into view are automatically given a new number. Though according to Daisy Dobrijevic at Space.com“scientists can track the sunspot’s progress across the sun’s far side by observing how it affects the sun’s vibrations or seismic echoes, using helioseismology data.” Sounds tricky. You’d think we’d have a camera on an asteroid on the far side recording the other half of sun, but we don’t. We spent $100 billion trying to blame a fertilizer for our storms, but a lot less than that trying to understand the sun.
As it happens, some officials at NASA even think the May aurora show was “one of the strongest auroras in 500 years”. They argue that some 7 different coronal mass ejections traveling at 3 million miles per hour, piled up together on the way and arrived all at once. In the last 70 years the other two big events were in 1958 and 2003. The Carrington event was so big it was seen in the Caribbean.
People who want to see an aurora may get lucky in the next two weeks if a flare is ejected in our direction
For those keen to see an aurora, look out for notices of a large X Class flares. Depending on how fast the ejections travel, the charged particles usually arrive here about two days later, but may come anytime from 15 hours to 4 or 5 days later. Once the particles hit the satellites at the Lagrange point the instruments give us about 15 to 45 minutes of warning. The Lagrange point is 1.5 million miles away from Earth towards the Sun in an area where gravitational and centripetal forces equal out, and it takes very little fuel for the satellites to maintain their position. It is the closest thing to a parking spot in space where our space-cars won’t roll away if we’re not looking.
For the record: Solar flares are graded B, C, M and X class, with X being the largest and each grade putting out ten times more energy than the grade before. Within each grade there are nine log divisions (Eg. M1, M2 etc.) There is no upper limit on X class flares and the one in 2003 overloaded the instruments (which max out at X17). It was later estimated to be X45, which sounds like it could have eaten the earth. The flares in May were smaller, like X4.5 and X5.8 but conglomerate.
X class flares can trigger planet wide radio blackouts and potentially widespread auroras.
UPDATE: Auroras are a fickle tool for measuring solar activity as only the ones aligned the opposite way to Earths magnetic field will generate the color-show in the sky.
“The degree of magnetic disturbance from a CME [coronal mass ejection] depends on the CME’s magnetic field and Earth’s. If the CME’s magnetic field is aligned with Earth’s, pointing from south to north the CME will pass on by with little effect. However, if the CME is aligned in the opposite direction it can cause Earth’s magnetic field to be reorganized, triggering large geomagnetic storms. “ — Space.com
The direction of the solar wind interplanetary magnetic field is called the clock angle, and to see an aurora we need the “Bz” to be negative. Since the sun flips its own magnetic field with each cycle, perhaps one orientation is more likely to generate auroras than the other? Some Russians claim that “odd numbered” solar cycles are more exciting for aurora watchers (and this is an odd numbered cycle — number 25). It maybe no accident that the last big auroras were 21 years ago at the peak of the last solar maximum with the solar north pointed in the same direction as it is now. So get your fill now of auroras if you can. It may be 22 years between drinks, so to speak.
UPDATE #2: Sorry — thinking about it, the sun flips magnetic poles at solar maxima (ie. soon) not at solar minima but we label the “cycles” from solar minima to minima. Hence each 11 year Schwabe cycle will be half North-South, then the sun will flip to South-North for the second half. So it doesn’t necessarily follow that odd or even solar cycles will be better or worse for auroras. There is probably a 22 year pattern for auroras but it will be split across Schwabe cycles.
We found out last year that offshore wind turbines scramble Air Force Radars. RAF pilots already use the turbines in training exercises to help them hide. But ships also use radar and a new study quietly reported a couple of years ago that offshore wind turbines will interfere with shipping radar, may cause collisions, and interfere with search and rescue. The 2022 report was from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US.
But it’s OK right, we just need to upgrade all the old radar systems, keep boats out of the area, or wrap the blades of the turbines in the same material we use on stealth aircraft. (That will add to the costs of wind power). No doubt GPS and AI systems can help, but radar adds an independent and well developed layer of safety. Who wants to purely rely on the satellite connection on a stormy night?
And after we’ve built all the wind towers, upgraded the boats and planes, then we can build the second and third generation of turbines and fill holes in the ground with the waste from the first. After we’ve paid for that and for the collisions and lives lost, and the whales killed, and the porpoises deafened, we hope that in one hundred years the rain will be more evenly spread, and the storms more well behaved. It’s like the neolithic raindances never ended.
You never know, maybe some groups will benefit from the radar noise — like drug runners, pirates and people smugglers?
Unfortunately wind turbines are usually built close to shore, where our shipping lanes often are…
It turns out that massive wind turbines may interfere with marine radar systems, making it risky for both big ships passing through shipping channels near offshore wind farms and smaller vessels navigating around them. While European and Asian nations have relied on offshore wind power for more than a decade, the big wind farms proposed off the US continental shelf are larger and spaced further apart, meaning that ships are more likely to be operating nearby. These farms are proposed along the East Coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina, as well as for a handful of locations off the California coast, according to data from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in a report issued last week that wind turbines can create two different problems. First, their steel towers can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships’ navigational radar systems in ways that might obscure a nearby boat.
The turbine’s rotating blades can also create a form of interference similar to the Doppler effect, in which sound waves shorten as a moving object approaches the observer. In this case, the spinning blades shorten and distort the radar signals sent from passing ships and can produce what’s called “blade flash” on a ship’s radar screen. These flashes can create false images that look like boats and could confuse a human radar operator on the bridge.
“If you have something that’s moving toward you and you are illuminating it with a radar signal, then the signal that is returned will actually have what’s called a phase shift. Essentially, it appears that you have the object coming closer,” says Jennifer Bernhard, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the National Academies panel that produced the report. Bernhard says that phenomena does not completely block the radar image, “but it does create clutter “…
There are no easy answers:
While the report offered some ways for mitigation, it noted that there is “no simple modification” that could allow marine vessel radar to operate in “the complex environments of a fully populated continental shelf wind farm.”
Deadly open-seas collisions and hampered search and rescue efforts
Disrupted radar systems are not mere hassles of dealing with cluttered displays. They can result in deadly open-seas collisions. The turbines can “cast radar shadows, obfuscating smaller vessels exiting wind facilities in the vicinity of deep draft vessels in Traffic Separation Schemes.”
… offshore wind turbines have been shown to affect the capabilities of the Coast Guard’s Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System (SAROPS), which is used for drift modeling and search planning. The oscillating rotor blades and generator of a wind turbine emit high levels of electromagnetic interference that can affect high frequency radar capabilities around an [offshore renewable energy installation] (OREI).
The map suggests multiple wind plants could severely limit radar operation:
There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell
Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste
Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.
The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).
Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.
The Australian government is telling us “we’re different” to other countries struggling to make wind and solar work. We supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously. On days like these, it doesn’t matter much whether we have 1,000 wind turbines or 10,000 if 95% of them are failing.
Compared to Europe, we have a natural disadvantage in wind power — there’s no one to rescue us when we screw up. We’re surrounded by vast oceans which make interconnectors prohibitively long, expensive and a strategic security risk for communist ships that might drag anchors accidentally-on-purpose through a region with long sub-sea cables. (Which is apparently what happened in the Baltic Sea last year).
So where exactly can we build another thousand wind turbines that would work on a day like today? Macquarie Island or Antarctica?
And it’s not just one day. So far for May 2024 wind generation has been unusually low about half the time.
Macquarie Island is 2,500 kilometers from the closest Australian capital city, and Casey base Antarctica is 3,500 kilometers away. It’s 2,000 kilometers direct to New Zealand, which is bad enough, but parts of the Tasman Sea are 5km deep. They don’t call it the “abyss” for nothing. In any case, wind speeds over New Zealand right now are only 1 – 7 km/hr. (At about 3pm EST Australia).
For the record, the National Energy Grid connects the Eastern five states of Australia and 90% of the population and is running at about 25GW in late autumn. The South West grid is a tenth of that, and all those other dots, apart from Darwin, are “microgrids”. In some parts of Australia all we need is one diesel generator, and we’ll put it on the national map. Kings Canyon, for example is just 1.1MW. The square is vastly larger than the town.
Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.
Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.
Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.
And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it ‘signal to noise’. The nonsense never ends.
A ‘random forest’ is not always the same thing as an ‘irregular backwoods’ or an ‘arbitrary timberland’ — especially if you’re writing a paper on machine learning and decision trees.
The most shocking thing is that no human brain even ran a late-night Friday-eye over the words before they passed the hallowed peer review and entered the sacred halls of scientific literature. Even a wine-soaked third year undergrad on work experience would surely have raised an eyebrow when local average energy became “territorial normal vitality”. And when a random value became an ‘irregular esteem’. Let me just generate some irregular esteem for you in Python?
If there was such a thing as scientific stand-up comedy, we could get plenty of material, not by asking ChatGPT to be funny, but by asking it to cheat. Where else could you talk about a mean square mistake?
Wiley — a mega publisher of science articles has admitted that 19 journals are so worthless, thanks to potential fraud, that they have to close them down. And the industry is now developing AI tools to catch the AI fakes (makes you feel all warm inside?)
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich.” Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. It appeared that all came from the same source.
One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.”
Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” The tool is publicly available.
Generative AI has just handed them a winning lottery ticket,” Eggleton of IOP Publishing said. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing.”
The ABC in Australia even wrote about this, but only because it worries about the loss of public faith in its pet universities:
For the ABC, peer review is like the Bible, and universities are the Church. The public must believe!
So the ABC makes excuses… Oh! Those poor poor universities, forced to become billion dollar businesses selling defacto Australian-citizenships to children of rich Chinese families. If only they got more money, their Vice Chancellors wouldn’t have to make do with million dollar salaries, and punishing professors who pointed out fraud, and they’d have time to do research and prevent the fraud instead.
Wiley’s ‘fake science’ scandal is just the latest chapter in a broader crisis of trust universities must address
By Linton Besser, ABC News
It [the Wiley debacle] also illustrates what is just another front in a much broader crisis of trust confronting universities and scientific institutions worldwide.
For decades now, teaching standards and academic integrity have been under siege at universities which, bereft of public funding, have turned to the very lucrative business of selling degrees to international students.
Grappling with pupils whose English is inadequate, tertiary institutions have become accustomed to routine cheating and plagiarism scandals. Another fraud perfected by the internet age.
This infection — the commodification of scholarship, the industrialisation of cheating — has now spread to the heart of scientific, higher research.
With careers defined by the lustre of their peer-reviewed titles, researchers the world over are under enormous pressure to publish.
Suffer the researchers who are forced to pay for fake papers just so they can “do their job”? Sack the lot.
The ABC is part of the reason science is corrupt to the core. The ABC Science Unit is paid to hold junk-science’s feet to the fire, instead it provides cover for the pagan witchcraft that passes for modern research.
The rot at Wiley started decades ago, but it got caught when it spent US $298 million on an Egyptian publishing house called Hindawi. We could say we hope no babies were hurt by fake papers but we know bad science already kills people. What we need are not “peer reviewed” papers but actual live face to face debate. Only when the best of both sides have to answer questions, with the data will we get real science:
In March, it revealed to the NYSE a $US9 million ($13.5 million) plunge in research revenue after being forced to “pause” the publication of so-called “special issue” journals by its Hindawi imprint, which it had acquired in 2021 for US$298 million ($450 million).
Its statement noted the Hindawi program, which comprised some 250 journals, had been “suspended temporarily due to the presence in certain special issues of compromised articles”.
Many of these suspect papers purported to be serious medical studies, including examinations of drug resistance in newborns with pneumonia and the value of MRI scans in the diagnosis of early liver disease. The journals involved included Disease Markers, BioMed Research International and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience.
The problem is only becoming more urgent. The recent explosion of artificial intelligence raises the stakes even further. A researcher at University College London recently found more than 1 per cent of all scientific articles published last year, some 60,000 papers, were likely written by a computer.
Even if one in five computer science papers are written by computers, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the rot at the core of “peer reviewed research”. The real rot is not the minor fraudsters making papers that no one reads to pad out their curriculum vitae. It’s the institutional parasites taking billions from taxpayers to create modeled garbage to justify the theft of trillions. But that’s another story.
PS: Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?
A new study shows electric cars are twice as likely to hit pedestrians compared to petrol and diesel cars. Presumably this is because EVs are so quiet. Though it’s also possible the dash interfaces are hideous, and some menu options are more deadly and distracting than others. Or perhaps EV drivers are more stressed or feeling nauseous? The study didn’t investigate that.
Amazingly the data was from six to ten years ago in the UK, so countless people have died in the interim, and if it is just a noise issue, it could have been fixed, or at least investigated. Where is the precautionary principle when you need it?
And if electric cars are killing more people in cities, we would presume that Fido and Spot would be a part of the carnage too. But who would know what the car-pet-kill tally was? Well, manufacturers might — they own the camera footage, but no one is even asking that question. Animals have rights you know, but they don’t donate to Greenpeace.
The Greens are rushing headlong to roll out the auto-weather-saving-machines across the countryside, and they might be killing wallabies and spotted quolls too but who cares, right? It’s not like anyone has done that study, or the Greens are worried about flattening a few rare endangered animals on their road to redemption.
Apparently, it makes sense if a few extra people and pets die now to save someone else who might suffer in one hundred years, maybe, if the computer models are right, and if EVs reduce emissions, and if emissions matter in the first place. All of which is unlikely. But rush, sprint, hurry to force those EVs onto the road. Even if they kidnap people, or kill children, it’s all for a good cause.
Study reveals a higher risk of accidents in urban areas across Great Britain from 2013 to 2017. Researchers call for measures to mitigate this risk as fossil-fuel vehicles are phased out.
A study has found that pedestrians are twice as likely to be hit by electric or hybrid vehicles compared to those powered by petrol or diesel. The research, which was published on May 21, 2024, in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, examined casualty rates in Great Britain from 2013 to 2017.
The risk is greater in urban areas, and governments must take steps to mitigate this safety hazard as they proceed to phase out fossil-fueled vehicles to improve air quality and curb climate change, urge the researchers.
Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young people, and 1 in 4 road traffic deaths are of pedestrians, they note. Amid the ongoing shift to electric and hybrid cars, concerns have been raised that these vehicles may pose more of a safety hazard to pedestrians than fossil-fuelled cars because they are quieter, particularly in urban areas where background ambient noise levels are higher.
the researchers calculate that between 2013 and 2017, the average annual casualty rates of pedestrians per 100 million miles of road travel were 5.16 for electric and hybrid vehicles and 2.40 for petrol and diesel vehicles.
Perhaps it’s really the fault of all those young inexperienced drivers?
And younger, less experienced drivers are more likely to be involved in a road traffic collision and are also more likely to own an electric car, possibly accounting for some of the observed heightened risk associated with these vehicles, they suggest.
The only thing we know for sure is that the rush to force EVs on us has nothing to do with morality or compassion. It’s not about saving lives or protecting fluffy mammals. The Greens don’t care about those lives now, let alone the people of the future.
Games with levelized guesses don’t take all the hidden costs into account
Prize of the day for national policy research goes to Nick Cater, who managed to ridicule our billion dollar national science agency, the CSIRO, with a newspaper column.
The CSIRO put out a report proclaiming that nuclear power would be impossible before 2040 and cost “twice as much” as renewables. But Nick Cater just compared electricity in New South Wales to Finland to prove their 129 pages of modeled costs were wrong:
On Saturday…. Electricity generation in NSW was releasing 750g of carbon into the atmosphere per megawatt hour of electricity. In Finland, it was 35g.
If the CSIRO’s GenCost report is to be believed, Finnish electricity prices should have gone through the roof a year ago when its newest reactor was turned on. They did not. The retail price of electricity in Finland, which is indexed to the spot market, came down almost immediately.
Were Energy Minister Chris Bowen to spend a few days in Finland, he might realise almost everything he says about nuclear is complete and utter nonsense. This might be why he spent his time in Europe last year trying to sell green hydrogen to the Germans.
All over Europe the countries with the most solar and wind power have the highest prices
Modeling electricity costs is ripe for the plucking, so the only costs that count are the real ones that customers pay. According to Eurostat data on electricity prices in the EU last year, some countries were paying twice as much as others. And the cheapest electricity was in countries using coal power or lands with lots of hydroelectricity and plenty of water.
And if nuclear power was “eight times” more expensive than solar and wind, why is that Germany pays so much more for electricity than France does?
Germany, Italy, Poland, and Greece are all pricey but none of them have nuclear plants (yet).
CSIRO artificially pumped up the cost of building a nuclear plant in Australia because it would be a new industry here. Did they do that for technologies that are barely invented like hydrogen and batteries too? They claim it would take 15 years to build one plant, yet the French built 56 plants in 15 years, and that was 40 years ago. The average build time then, without faxes, flip phones and “the internet” was just 7 years, yet somehow they got it done. Do the CSIRO think they can get away with publishing this kind of incompetent partisan hackery and Australians won’t find out?
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