A survey of Dept of Agriculture (USDA) scientists by the agency’s inspector general suggests some very fishy things are going on in government science:
[Darryl Fears, Washington Post] According to the survey’s findings, nearly 10 percent said their research has been tampered with or altered by superiors “for reasons other than technical merit,” possibly because of political considerations.
Looks like Monopsony Trouble: When almost all the research in some fields is done by government funding (one buyer), there is no competition. In answer to that, instead of finding ways to encourage competition, the government set up an agency instead — the SIP.
That didn’t work either.
In the survey, 85 percent of the 1,300 scientists who responded said the Scientific Integrity Policy established to protect their work didn’t benefit them, or offered no opinion. Nearly 20 percent said they didn’t know the policy existed.
Nearly 40 percent didn’t bother to take the survey, according to findings released April 13. Of those who did, more than half said they didn’t know how to file a complaint and some said they didn’t do so because they feared retaliation.
“You do not need to have many cases to create a strong chilling effect, and the current science climate inside USDA is quite nippy,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represented Lundgren.
The real story is no free speech, because when the biggest employer in town wants a certain kind of answer, there are ways to find it:
The USDA has said it doesn’t retaliate against any employee, and disputed Lundgren’s claim that he was targeted to suppress his science. Lundgren had been with the agency 11 years, ran his own lab with a staff and wrote a well-regarded book on predator insects, but his career began to fall apart when he published research that cautioned against the use of pesticides approved by the agency.
The story goes on to describe Lundgren’s 2014 whistleblower experience of suddenly having odd rules selectively enforced against him, but not against other researchers. Et Voila…
And this is only agriculture. You might think it would be tame.
Today, the misnomer “March for Science” is trying to take over the aging faded Earth Day. It’s an attempt to steal the good brand “Science” yet again for other causes.
Once upon a time, Earth Day used to mean something. Back in 1970, 20 million people took part, 12,000 events were held:
Congress took the day off, and two-thirds of its members — Democrat and Republican alike — spoke at Earth Day events. The Today show devoted 10 hours of airtime to Earth Day.
Can anyone imagine both sides of politics cheering the March for Science?
By 2013, Time Magazine noted how irrelevant it was:
Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is “passion” and “belief”. Don’t turn up thinking this is about the dispassionate Laws of Physics. You’ll be at the wrong rally.
Is the March to solve a problem or create one?
The March seems to be fighting strawmen. It is supposedly about “Encouraging scientists to share their research” (as if scientists like to hide their research). We know they hide their data, their methods and their adjustments, but when the ABC turns up to interview them, they don’t seem to hide their opinions. They hide their declines but don’t hide their Nobel Prizes (even if they didn’t get them). Do they need encouragement?
And the March is there, apparently, “affirming science as a vital feature of a working democracy”, who says it isn’t? Like voters have been asking for witchdoctors instead? Absolutely no one is questioning science’s role in democracy. Science has such an incredible halo, it is considered to be so-above-question that everyone wants to brand their version of reality as “science”. There are no marches for stone-age solutions, no “anti-science” movements (except inadvertently by those who think models produce evidence). But those who falsely cloak themselves in the science flag want us to think there is an anti-science movement, so this feeds their own comfortable delusion.
There is major muddying going on here
What does it mean to “advocate for open and accessible science?” . These are the same people who fight to the death to prevent heretics from publishing a paper, or from doing a radio interview, or from opening a research centre. The point of including statements like that is to blur the reality for onlookers and fool the puppet marchers. It’s just more “fog”.
It’s a march for “robust funding” (give us the money)
Those who can’t discover something useful have to march in the streets instead. The March is one big Pat-on-The-Back for the crusaders for taxpayer funds.
It’s a feel good March: feel good about your IQ
The organisers want Marchers to feel like they have the high ground, the smarts, but check out the advice to the noble superior mind:
Don’t pick fights (either verbal, physical or metaphorical) with people who you think are dumb, wrong, dangerous or unpleasant.
That ugly sentiment gets repeated (in case you missed it):
But do stick to your guns. [Whatever they are, eh?.] Appealing to broader interests doesn’t have to mean pandering to interests that you think are dumb, wrong, dangerous or just plain unpleasant.
People with a different scientific opinion are obviously dumb, wrong, dangerous or just unpleasant. Plenty of smug warfare going on here.
Grant and Lamberts advice includes telling Marchers “Now is not the time to try to “correct” the misconceptions and “woo” of people who might not be as scientifically informed as you. ” He might as well put out a clickbait advertisement for a free booster shot of scientific ego. This march is for the A+ science students who never got A but know they should have. Come march with us, we are all so clevah.
And they’ll need to be clever if they are going to simultaneously follow his advice and “not correct misconceptions” while they also “stick to their guns”.
Advice, point 7, is to bring sex workers:
Publicly embrace others, and get them to embrace you. If anyone should stand out at this march, it’s people who aren’t scientists. Do you know a group of firefighters, senior citizens or sex-workers who’d be prepared to march with signs saying “[non-science group of people] for science”? Give them a call and get them on board. Maybe get them to dress in uniform!
Lamberts and Grant wrote this article a month ago but openly admit they were struggling to explain why they were marching.
Don’t miss the clarity in the closer:
Now get out there
There’s still a bit of time to think about this and get it right. Of course, what “right” means will differ from person to person, so let’s get that clear before rushing out on April 22 and making all kinds of different noises.
For skeptical scientists, if we were Marching for Science we wouldn’t have to work out what we were marching for with four weeks to go.
It’s a wonderful feeling to unite with like-minded people, but let’s strive to show we are united for something that non-science people can relate to as well, or we’ll be portrayed as being united against those very same folks.
So even when you are making “different noises” in a march that no one knows what the mission is, it’s good to unite with “like-minds” — people who are just as confused.
As for being afraid of being portrayed as being united against “those very same folks” — the Marchers might stop calling them dumb, wrong, dangerous and unpleasant maybe?
Overnight a river in Northern Canada disappeared. A glacier had retreated and allowed the water upstream to sneak out via a different path. The water now ends up in the Pacific 1300 km away from the Bering sea where it used to emerge.
A close-up view of the ice-walled canyon at the terminus of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, with recently collapsed ice blocks. This canyon now carries almost all meltwater from the toe of the glacier down the Kaskawulsh Valley and toward the Gulf of Alaska.
Credit: Jim Best/University of Illinois
You might think this event has happened every time glaciers retreated in the last 30 million years, but you would be wrong. Really, this is due to coal-fired power stations.
In a report published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dr. Shugar and his colleagues provide a detailed analysis of how an atmosphere warmed by fossil-fuel emissions has led to the river’s dramatic disappearance.
“To me, it’s kind of a metaphor for what can happen with sudden change induced by climate,” said John Clague, who holds a chair in natural hazard research at Simon Fraser University and was a co-author on the report.
Let’s play River-trivia — all the other times the world warmed, the river rerouted more slowly because:
CO2Science found a 1999 paper done in China that shows just how awful climate change is for cotton. It’s a major global crop for fibre and oil and when the researchers warmed daytime growing conditions from 27C to 34C the plants seemed pretty happy about it as they grew faster and bigger. But if CO2 levels doubled as well, in hot conditions plant growth was up 60%. (Panic now. It’s a international emergency).
…
Don’t change your cotton futures portfolio just yet. At the current rate of warming (0.13C/decade) it will take about 500 years for Earth to get seven degrees warmer.
For the last twenty years, The Antarctic Peninsula was the poster-peninsula for the Global Worriers as they calculate how many meters the oceans will rise when it melts, but all across it, temperatures are going down, not up.
We can knock half to one degree off:
This cooling has amounted to a 0.5 to 0.9 °C decrease in temperatures in most of the Antarctic Peninsula region, the only exception being three stations located in the southwest sector of the peninsula that experienced a slight delay in their thermal turning point, declining only over the shorter period of the past decade.
The start points matter. The cooling started after 1998, which was an El Nino, and we can see there was a similar downward slope from 1983 to 1993. As usual, with a climate graph, there are steps and stairs, and there is a trend up in the last 50 years (but probably down in the last 7,000).Whatever.
What there isn’t, most definitely, is a trend that fits carbon emissions.
Not that the media seem to mention that. Here’s The Independent, UK, March 2nd, 2017:
There also isn’t a trend that fits the climate models which told us it would be the most rapidly warming place on Earth. From CO2Science — other studies also came to the same conclusion:
However, in recent years two studies have challenged this assessment. Carrasco (2013) reported finding a decrease in the warming rate from stations on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula between 2001 and 2010, as well as a slight cooling trend for King George Island (in the South Shetland Islands just off the peninsula). Similarly, in an analysis of the regional stacked temperature record over the period 1979-2014, Turner et al. (2016) reported a switch from warming during 1979-1997 to cooling thereafter (1999-2014). And now, in 2017, we have a third assessment of recent temperature trends on the Antarctic Peninsula confirming that the canary is alive and well!
Oliva, M., Navarro, F, Hrbácek, F., Hernández, A., Nývlt, D., Pereira, P., Ruiz-Fernández, J. and Trigo, R. 2017. Recent regional climate cooling on the Antarctic Peninsula and associated impacts on the cryosphere. Science of the Total Environment580: 210-223.
Let’s close the cheapest generators of electricity. Will electricity bills:
a/ go down, b/ go up, or c/ be paid by The Tooth Fairy?
A quarter of Australians don’t know. A half think the answer is “b” or “c”. It’s that bad.
A new survey came out this week which fans of renewables are using to argue we need more renewables, but hidden in the data is the big misinformation that underlies this attitude.
The wisdom of a campaign by the Turnbull government emphasising the risks of moving too rapidly to renewable energy has been thrown into question by polling that suggests a majority of its supporters don’t agree.
Not at all. The real issue, that Adam Morton misses, is that so much of the country is horribly misinformed. All the key questions in the survey depend on what would happen to electricity prices, and nearly half the country lives under the delusion that “renewables” make our electricity prices cheaper.
All Malcolm Turnbull has to do to turn these figures around is to tell the fact that coal fired electricity is generated for 3 – 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Then run this survey again, and see support for a renewables target crash.
Most Australians have no idea that coal fired power is the cheapest power by far. The Tooth Fairy subsidies mean that some people with solar panels on their roof think they are getting “cheap electricity” when really someone else is paying part of their bill.
Just find us one nation running on wind and solar that has cheap electricity. They don’t exist. The only cost effective renewable energy comes from hydro. Wind and solar theoretically provide cheap electrons sometimes, but we need electricity all day every day, and the net effect the intermittent sources have on the whole grid makes for expensive electricity. The intermittent generators stop us from getting cheap electricity. The subsidies to pander to them (like the RET) force the cheap generators out of the market.
..
If the Australia Institute really wanted to understand what Australians think, they would have told Australians the price of coal fired electricity, told them the cost of the subsidy (RET = 8c/KWhr) and asked people how many dollars extra they are willing to pay for the RET, instead of quizzing them with loaded questions about situations that don’t exist anywhere in the world.
These push-polling type surveys that miss the key facts in the debate are measuring the success of PR campaigns, or the ignorance of respondents.
Terror, terror I tell you — as the accumulated energy of cyclones in the southern half of the planet reaches a new low, far below anything seen in records that go back to 1971.
Meteorologist Ryan Maue of Weatherbell Analytics noted tropical cyclone activity in the Southern Hemisphere for the 2016-2017 season is the “quietest on record, by far” based on records going back nearly five decades.
So far, the Southern Hemisphere has seen 13 named storms, including four hurricane-strength storms. Only two of those storms became major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher, according to data compiled by Colorado State University.
I don’t think Al Gore will be mentioning this in his inconvenient advertising.
The Heartland Institute sent a round of 25,000 books to science teachers across the US. Knowing Heartland, the book Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming is loaded with dangerous material — peer reviewed references, graphs with both axes, stuff like that. Because it will have been checked, cross checked and subjected to twenty years of non-stop criticism it will be packed with facts. And that’s why the Climate Religion is so terribly, awfully scared of it.
The NSTC took the extraordinary step of writing to teachers and naming all the errors they could find, which was none. In lieu of that, they said it was false information anyway because, hey, they could still spell both words.
“Second, labeling propaganda as science does not make it so.
Exactly, just what I was thinking. How long before science teachers realize that the people who are afraid to read books are the ones pushing the propaganda?
Third, science teachers are the critical bastion in the war against reason. And the special interests know it.”
So true. And the special interests marched right through education 30 years ago. How many science teachers know the scientific method? Aristotelian reasoning?
Well some still do, and they’ll find the book an excellent resource.
Right now, the NSTC needs to hear from people who do know what the scientific method is, and who can explain how empirical evidence does not come from a climate model.
Inside Climate News found Brandie Freeman, an environmental science and chemistry teacher who won a National Science Teachers Association STEM award. So apparently the best of the best. So what did she do when she was given a free science book that disagreed with the dogma? She was insulted.
I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story.
Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that.
Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal is to help people cope with what’s been called “climate grief” — anxiety, sadness, depression, and other emotions provoked by awareness of the planet’s march toward a hotter,… future…
What she found was that feelings of sadness and anxiety, and even literal nightmares, were common. Last year, with the help of her partner, Aimee Reau, Schmidt developed a nine-step program for building resiliency loosely modeled on AA…
But this is big:
About a dozen people attend each session and 50 subscribe to its mailings.
If I get 12 people to my house, and have 12,000 subscribers, do you think Grist will write it up?
Perhaps they have some good results?
Perhaps not:
Schmidt, who now works as an outreach coordinator at the environmental group HEAL Utah, hopes to soon evaluate the pilot, incorporate the program as a nonprofit…
I predict she’ll make much more profit as a nonprofit.
The article tells the story of Keira Bitter, who has it tough. Her family are all Trump voters. She felt alone, even broke down in tears at the first session. So what did the team do — made her feel worse:
The group has been educating her about the consequences of climate change, which has caused her more short-term anxiety,…
One climate grief victim finds it hard to stay in a shop filled with poisonous packaging:
The meetings have been held at the home of Alli Harbertson, who met Schmidt three years ago through a wilderness “vision fast” program. Harbertson works as a caterer, and she recalls once standing in a Costco aisle, surrounded by carts with packaged foods up to people’s shoulders. She retreated to her car for a while before she could face the store again.
Jokes aside about the snowflake shoppers, these people are acting with integrity (if you believe in the climate models and labcoat curses). If the climate scientists are right, and the public believed them, there would be millions of people with these fears and anxieties.
Here’s the bitter Take Home Message for one Climate Griever:
Dick Meyer: “We all live, don’t we, with the notion that if we need it, someone will come save us?” he says. “Well, no one is coming to save you. Certainly not someone from Washington.”
This is the religion of the US President as Messiah — and the discovery of the ugly truth that there are no Gods in Washington. While presidents look like they are giving bread and fishes, it’s an illusion: they have no bread and fishes to give, they take from some and give that to others.
I’d like to suggest a four step program to end Climate Grief:
The Arctic is the most sensitive place to man-made emissions on Earth, which is why it has barely warmed since 1944? Well, it makes sense if CO2 is largely irrelevant. Humans have made 90% of all their CO2 in the last 70 years and nothing much happened in the place where it was supposed to hurt the most.
The WMO apparently missed the first 30 years of data. But Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt are here to help them out. : -)
Area weighted Arctic (70-90N) monthly surface air temperature anomalies (HadCRUT4) since 1920 in relation to the WMO normal period 1961-1990. Fig. 2: Arctic temperature since 1920. Data: HadCRUT4, Chart: Climate4You.
These heat waves look a lot like the last heat waves.
Read it all thanks to Pierre Gosselins translation:
Before we move on to your new partnership, let us think about Scott Morrison’s words:
“Governments must do no harm”.
As a political thinker he is “out there”, our Scotty isn’t he Gentlemen?
Perhaps we need him on the home team in the energy market do you think?
National Electricity Market Grid 4th April 2017 (Click to enlarge)
The solid basis on which the Turnbull/Andrews partnership needs to be formed has to originate with the achievements you have both made so far. Let’s list them:
Through your deliberate actions (and failure to act) of shutting Hazelwood, you have reduced mankind’s contribution of CO2 by a factor of 0.0002. That reduction, when compared with the CO2 produced by animals consuming vegetation and microbes consuming vegetation is a ratio of 0.000025. Hmmmm……..
You have just put at least 1,000 people out of work in the Latrobe Valley.
You will bankrupt many businesses in the Latrobe Valley and devastate a whole slab of the Nation’s economy.
You have placed the viability of every single manufacturing business in Eastern and South Australia under threat – with the certainty of unemployment for hundreds of thousands of people if the madness continues. These businesses are now less able to compete with imports and less able to compete when exporting.
You have caused power prices for every single Eastern and South Australian to rise by a ridiculous amount – because the forced removal of a marginal 1600Mw makes a massive difference to the price of a commodity in short supply.
You have introduced a new unprecedented level of risk of blackouts to 89% of the Australian population. Look at the attached AEMO record for this evidence.
You have caused an unprecedented rise in the price of east Australian gas by pushing 1600 Mw of generation away from coal and on to our dwindling gas supply.
Your initiative of closing Hazelwood has increased the probability of gas supply shortages for 89% of our population.
You have increased our farmers’ costs which also makes them less able to compete with imports and less able to export. After some of them have weathered a few previous frontal assaults from Coles, Woolworths, the Chinese Government and Murray Goulburn, your increased power prices to run milking machines, pumps and chilling equipment are just what a struggling dairy farmer needs.
You have made the large gas supply companies and power generating companies – and those with a finger in the renewables honey-pot – an absolute fortune for their shareholders. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Australian Federal Government and the Victorian Government actually exist to benefit shareholders of those companies – and not your own constituents!!
Gentlemen, even a compliant media will not save you from what is going to happen soon.
Click to enlarge to read.
Your choices are simple:
Wait for a single interconnector trip or other unplanned event to black out a whole slab of Eastern Australia and then receive an absolute flogging over Hazelwood and be forced into an embarrassing re-start of the Station.
Have some initiative, form a strong home team together and get the Station fired up again without delay.
You have both seen that the Weatherillesque technique of blaming everyone else for his own failures – even with a fully compliant S.A. media on side – wears a bit thin when the lights go out and voters get ready to reach for baseball bats – so it is time for you to form a partnership and start doing the right thing Gentlemen.
You will both be congratulated for putting childish Politics to one side and behaving like true leaders.
Originally, intersectionality referred to the discrimination faced by black women that is not only sexism and racism, but an experience that is more than the sum of its parts (now referred to as “misogynoir” in black feminist and womanist circles). Intersectionality has since been expanded to include the analysis of discrimination faced by anyone who identifies with the multiple social, biological, and cultural groups that are not favored in a patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist society.
i.e. translated: Intersectionality is the study of discrimination which discriminates against older white men.
Science used to be about measurements and observations. Seemed to work.
For a long time it was thought the first people arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago. Jacques Cinq-Marc found a set of caves in the Yukon called the Bluefish Caves laden with bones marked with cuts from human butchering. They were radiocarbon dated as 24,000 years old. Cinq-Marcs published a series of papers between 1979-2001.
This is a topic that doesn’t have a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry riding on it. No political careers are made or broken if humans arrived in the Americas millenia earlier. Yet still, the smug scoffing of the consensus slowed progress in science for decades.
Cinq-Mars… work at Bluefish Caves suggested that Asian hunters roamed northern Yukon at least 11,000 years before the arrival of the Clovis people. And other research projects lent some support to the idea. At a small scattering of sites, from Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania to Monte Verde in Chile, archaeologists had unearthed hearths, stone tools and butchered animal remains that pointed to an earlier migration to the Americas. But rather than launching a major new search for more early evidence, the finds stirred fierce opposition and a bitter debate, “one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science,” noted the journal Nature.
But relatively few of Cinq-Mars’s peers shared his confidence. And as I began regularly attending archaeological conferences in the years following that trip to Bluefish Caves, I saw what Cinq-Mars was up against. Sitting in halls with Canadian and American researchers, I witnessed what happened when archaeologists presented data that contradicted the Clovis first model. Often a polite bemusement spread through the room, as if the audience was dealing with some crackpot uncle, or the atmosphere grew testy and tense as someone began grilling the presenter. But once or twice, the mask of professional respect slipped completely; I heard laughter and snickering in the room. Tom Dillehay remembers such conferences well. “Some Clovis first people had a suffocating air of defiance and superiority at times,” he says.
Stung as he was by the criticism, Cinq-Mars refused to back down. None of the explanations for splintered bones, he noted, could account for the complex chain of steps that produced the mammoth-bone flake tool his team found. But by then, serious doubts about the Bluefish Caves evidence had been sown, taking firm root in the archaeological community: Hardly anyone was listening. Cinq-Mars couldn’t believe it. At one presentation he gave, “they laughed at me,” he says angrily today. “They found me cute.” Embittered by the response, he stopped attending conferences, and gave up defending the site publicly. What was the point? To Cinq-Mars, the Clovis first supporters seemed almost brainwashed.
For Mackie and others, the protracted battle over the Clovis first model now stands as a cautionary tale for archaeologists. Notes Mackie, “Clovis first will, I believe, go down as a classic example of a paradigm shift, in which the evidence for the collapse of an old model is present for many years before it actually collapses, producing a sort of zombie model that won’t die.”
Fantastic to finally see real scientists get a voice in a considered, official forum. This should have happened 20 years ago. I expect only climate-tragics will watch a 2 hour dry Congressional testimony, but it is so very rare that both sides of the debate get questioned in the same forum and almost never that skeptical scientists outnumber the unskeptical ones. Michael Mann has little more than namecalling, unscientific social speculation, allusions about “motivations” and political labels. Improbably, Mann the media-climate-celebrity tries to make out he is the victim of bullying and silencing. At 1:10 Mann twists, exaggerates and abuses like a Greenpeace activist and Congressman Lamar Smith pulls him up…
Judith Curry talks about why she changed her mind starting at 20 minutes, and why she resigned.
“… I realized the premature consensus was harming the progress of science”
“Scientists who demonize opponents are behaving in a way that is antithetical to the scientific process. These are the tactics for enforcing a premature theory for political purpose.”
“Those people who are not in agreement with opponents (of climate change) may not be at all silly,” Putin replied via an interpreter.
With 10% of the Russian GDP dependent on the Arctic, he also said:
“Climate change brings in more favorable conditions and improves the economic potential of this region,”…
We can’t have that then.
Mr. Putin thinks skeptics are right,
To reject the fake warmist fight,
As a great waste of time,
When a mild Arctic clime,
Makes the future in every way bright.
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