|
|
Photo taken by Ansgar Walk
By Jo Nova
The Experts thought Greenland’s ice has been there for the whole Pleistoscene era, or the last 2.6 million years. It was just another useless consensus, stultifying science — feeding the myth that the climate was perfect until Big Coal screwed it up.
Map adapted from Westoff et al 2022
Finally, 30 years after the famous GISP ice core was hauled out of the Greenland summit, someone has bothered to study the dirt at the bottom and found poppy seeds, willow twigs and insects there, where they were not supposed to be. They discovered a vibrant tundra ecosystem where there was supposed to be an ice-cap. The obvious conclusion is that cavemen didn’t cause it, and that there must be some huge other natural forces at work that we have no clue about. Our climate models didn’t predict this, because CO2 was low then and clearly, the models are hopelessly incomplete. We are babes in the wood on the third rock from the sun.
The captive science PR writers don’t tell us that CO2 might be irrelevant compared to the big mystery forces we don’t understand. Instead they tell […]
By Jo Nova
A new paper tries to clean up the chicken entrail decrees of Mark Lynas (and earlier of John Cook) and concludes that their methodology is so bad, a 99.85% consensus could just as easily have been 32%.
All the papers in between 32 and 99% were neutral on the cause of man-made climate catastrophes, but Lynas et al bundled them in with the believer pack and made hay in the global media. This was even though many of the “neutral” papers showed results that didn’t fit the consensus. But who cares about results eh? If an abstract was neutral, it was therefore a “sign” the authors believed — like reading their tea leaves, or laying out the entrails. (Either that or it was a sign scientists who question the dogma get sacked, lose funding, and get uninvited to laboratory barbeques, but, shh! We won’t mention that.) So Lynas assumes that as long as a scientist doesn’t specifically say they disagree, they de facto endorse the “consensus”.
Why do people who call themselves scientists even talk about a “consensus”?
Obviously if believers had evidence, they’d talk about that instead.
Dentelski et al do an admirable job of pointing […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another climate denier with a Nobel Prize in Physics…
John Clauser, Nobel Prize winner.
Dr John F Clauser of quantum entanglement fame, leaves no doubt about his thoughts:
“…climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”.
Despite that, the ABC and BBC types won’t pick up the phone to ask Dr John F Clauser why a man with his remarkable reputation would risk looking like an idiot, and speaking up as a climate skeptic. It’s not that they are afraid he might bore the audience or sound like a kook. They won’t ask him because they’re afraid he’ll have a good answer.
How much damage would it do to the cause if the audience finds out that one of the highest ranking scientists in the world disagrees with the mantra? It would break that sacred spell. Suddenly, the unwashed masses will realize “there is a debate”, and that all the times they were told “the debate was over”, they were being lied too.
The same team that tells us that we must “listen to the experts”, won’t listen to any experts they don’t like. They rave about “UN Experts” that […]
The new Climate Consensus is just a junk keyword survey.
Climate change is a branch of science that’s immature, complex, and has error bars a hundred miles wide. If 99% of scientists say the same thing, it’s a cult, not a science. The climate is not man-made but the irrelevant consensus surely is.
By studying words in industry publications, Mark Lynas thinks he’s discovered a scientific truth. Instead he has just shown that skeptics get purged from peer review. It’s official now, 99% of peer reviewed articles have to say they believe in order to get published.
He thought he was doing climate science but instead he studied sociology. If Mark Lynas proved anything it’s that he doesn’t know what science is, and only unskeptical papers pass peer review. It’s a sad sad statement about the state of the scientific-industry.
Hypothetically, if we cared at all about unscientific opinion-polling of climate scientists, we’d just opinion-poll them. He could run up a survey and email it out. It’d still be a fallacy, but at least it would tell us what scientists thought. Instead, Mark Lynas and co have taken a long roundabout route to poll them by proxy. It’s the oddly […]
Depressing. A consensus based on nothing much, still lasted three generations
And it’s not dead yet: Groups like the American Heart Association, UCSF Guidelines, VicHealth, etc are all still advising that people avoid saturated fats, and eat whole grains.
For years, people with the kind of high cholesterol linked to their genes, were told they could lower their cholesterol if they stopped eating things like butter, cream, eggs, cheese, chocolate, and even coconut oil.
A new study looked for evidence to justify that advice and couldn’t find any. They are, of course, not the first — even in the 1950s John Yudkin was already warning people about the dangers of sugar. But the vested interests and fat-police leapt into gear, and thus and verily a million low-fat products filled the shelves, most of them with added sugar.
How many people did this consensus kill?
People with high cholesterol should eliminate carbs, not saturated fat, study suggests
“For the past 80 years, people with familial hypercholesterolemia have been told to lower their cholesterol with a low saturated fat diet,” said lead author David Diamond, professor and heart disease researcher at the University of South Florida. “Our study showed that […]
The evidence is overwhelming but the names of 85 unconvinced experts threatens the Earth. Shield your eyes, sinner, lest ye faith be tested!
…
The Religion of Carbonoid-Weather-Control is so fragile, and Wikipedia so captured by philosophical fruit flies, that 35 editors voted down 19 other editors and now The List does not exist. Thus do 35 editors keep safe the minds of Wikipedia babes who might get confused when they see Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencers names and mistake them for actual climate scientists… oh.
Thanks to Dr Roger Higgs:
Electroverse: Wikipedia deletes scientists who disagree…
Here’s the reasoning for the censorship given by one of the Wiki editors:
“The result was delete. This is because I see a consensus here that there is no value in having a list that combines the qualities of a) being a scientist, in the general sense of that word, and b) disagreeing with the scientific consensus on global warming.”
Wikipedia
I’d like to thank those 35 Wiki editors for telling the world how weak the consensus is and giving skeptics another excuse to highlight this dangerous list. Go Streisand Effect.
Cap Allon […]
…
Who remembers that 15,000 scientists signed some climate declaration in 2017? The same Prof Ripple, and Bioscience probably hope you don’t, because two years later there is the same rehashed, but with only 11,000 signatories. So 4,000 disappeared without a trace. There are however, the same comic indefendable graphs. Call it “extreme graphing” — every line needs to be diagonal. All “pauses” are disappearing. No fallacy remains unbroken.
To stop storms we apparently need to reduce the global population, stop mining “excessive” minerals, eat more veges, and we need to preserve biodiversity, reefs, forests and greenery at whatever it was in 1685 or whenever the sacred preindustrial year of Life On Earth is declared. You know the drill — coal and oil are demon spirits. Exorcise them now! Then rinse, repeat and …hand-wash your undies.
This is panic-science: hold the error bars, hide the adjustments and heap on the hype.
Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’
Damian Carrington, The Guardian
The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.
“We […]
Skeptics get banned, rejected, blocked and sacked from the mainstream media yet somehow Nature has a paper on Skeptics getting too much media. Believers don’t have to be an expert to control the news agenda, just a Greenpeace activist, or a teenage girl. Skeptics on the other hand, can be Nobel Prize winners, but the BBC won’t even phone them.
Nature, the former science giant, just launched the tenets of science over the event horizon. This paper is Argument from Authority rolled into false equivalence, and powered with cherry-picked errors in both category and in categorization. Nonsense on a rocket. It’s not what science is, and it’s not what journalism should be either. And Nature is supposed to be both. Judith Curry calls it The latest travesty in ‘consensus enforcement’ and the worst paper she has ever seen in a reputable journal.
….
Both David Evans and I get a mention on what is effectively Nature‘s blacklist. What an honour! No really — there are 386 great names. Even more of an honour is a mention on Judith Curry’s site “blogs she’s learnt something from”. (By some freak, my name comes right after Freeman Dyson and Ivar […]
Skeptical scientists outnumber the unskeptical ones
The “News” today: 15,000 scientists have signed some 25 year old repeat failed climate doom prediction. Headlines are everywhere.
So today is also the perfect day to point out that ten years ago 31,487 American Scientists, including 9,029 with PhD’s signed the Global Warming Petition Project warning that there is no convincing scientific evidence that man-made CO2 will cause catastrophic heating, and that agreements like Kyoto (and Paris) are harmful, and hinder science.
Opinion polls are a measure of sociology rather than science, but since skeptics win them, go forth and spread the word and shine a light on media bias, as well as on the large unheralded mass of skeptical scientists across the world.
The Petition Project was better done, done years ago, done twice, and has twice as many names on it.
Don’t miss the opportunity to pop in on the same journalists that think a list of 15,000 scientists doing a ten second internet form is newsworthy, but 30,000 checked and accredited scientists signing and mailing a paper form is not. Let them bask in their hypocrisy. Turn the screws on their cognitive dissonance. Be polite. Enjoy their struggle.
For the […]
How many people have died prematurely because they swapped their fats for carbohydrates?
More fat meant less death (left). More carbs (right) meant the opposite (at least above 60%). (Click to see the full table of Figure 1 results).
New research published in the Lancet shows that low fat diets could increase your risk of death.
Specifically, those who are in the top fifth of carbohydrate-eaters are also about 28% more likely to die than the fifth eating the lowest amount. This is a correlation (only), but the PURE* study was tracking the thing that matters most — all-cause mortality — and they followed the diets of 135,000 people in 18 countries for 5 – 9 years. Loosely, if people avoided high carbohydrate diets, they were less likely to die.
The graph flattens off below “60% carbs” (that’s a percentage of total calories). However, the mortality numbers keep improving for the highest fat intakes which rather skewers 40 years of headlines. I’m guessing that some people who kept carbs below 60% ate more protein instead, which, judging by the “fat” graph, wasn’t as useful.
The McMaster University team announced this quiet bomb, slightly obscured, in a press release […]
Verily. Eclipses do weird things to people.
Justin Gillis, writer for The New York Times used the recent eclipse to sell something I’d call Sciencemagic. Essentially, if some Scientists™ can calculate orbital mechanics to a fine art, it follows, ipso nonfacto, that all people who use the same job title are also always right.
“Should You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clue”
Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.
If Scientists™ say that solar panels will stop malaria, then buy some! Save lives in Ghana. (What are you waiting for?)
The implications stretch far. Clearly, we can chuck out the whole research thing (labs, who needs em?) Why test predictions, if Scientists™ are 100% accurate? We’ve been wasting money. We don’t need more large hadron colliders, we just need to survey more particle physicists.
This idea that job titles have a kind of truth-telling power is not much different to astrology where truth […]
In 2016 67% of meteorologists said that humans have caused most or all climate change and The Guardian headlined that there was a Growing Consensus among Meteorologists. In 2017 that fell to only 49%. The Guardian said nothing.
….
In 2016 29% of meteorologists thought climate change was largely or entirely man-made, but that fell to only 15% this year.
Figure how this result fits with the idea of the overwhelming evidence and 97% consensus. Which group on the planet after climate scientists should be the second profession to “get it” — how about meteorologists?
So either:
1. meteorologists are really stupid, or
2. meteorologists know how hard it is to predict the climate.
8.7 out of 10 based on 88 ratings […]
Université de Montréal.
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.
What Happens When an Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking?
Heather Pringer, Smithsonian.com
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 […]
The Global Cooling Scare of the 1970s was real, there was a consensus, and it was all over the media. It flies in the face of the man-made warming campaign. After World War II there was a massive industrial escalation in the West. And just as coal fired power was going in everywhere, the world damnwell cooled by -0.3°C. It’s obvious that the modern Climate Witches don’t want people bringing this up.
…
Where’s that cooling gone? The modern NASA GISS dataset adjusted it away:
What happened to 40 years of cooling from WWII onewards?
That’s the magic of homogenisation.
In 2008, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck published “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” . The Myth paper “found” that from 1965 through 1979, there were only 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers. It was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), showing how pathetically weak the caliber of review is there. Kenneth Richard searched, found and documents 220 papers, not 7 in the same period. He estimates there are probably many more.
The Connolley there is none other than the William Connolly who abused Wikipedia’s editing rules — barred 2,000 other […]
How many Presidential candidates are susceptible to groupthink, scare campaigns and low-base science agitprop? Thanks to Seth Borenstein, Michael Mann & Andrew Dessler we can rank them according to their ability to resist profoundly unscientific propaganda like “there is a consensus”.
Ted Cruz is clearly the best at holding his own in the independent thinker stakes. Ben Carson and Donald Trump do well. But poor Hillary Clinton doesn’t stand a chance against the onslaught of junk graphs, hyperbolic claims, and inane bumper-sticker cliches.
…
Those who fall for the consensus argument are in no position to run a nation. Firstly it’s profoundly unscientific — we don’t vote for the laws of science; scientific theories are either true or not true regardless of opinions. Secondly, it only takes ten minutes of independent searching to find that there is no consensus among scientists as a broad group, anyway. There is a consensus among various definitions of certified climate scientists, but not among meteorologists , geoscientists and engineers or other hard science areas.
As I’ve said before, skeptics outrank and outnumber believers, they make planes fly, find mineral deposits, and walked on the moon. Believers produce climate models that don’t work. If […]
…
I used to think there was a consensus among government-funded certified climate scientists, but a better study by Verheggen Strengers, Verheegen, and Vringer shows even that is not true.[1] The “97% consensus” is now 43%.
Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “95%” certainty.
More than 1800 international scientists studying various aspects of climate change (including climate physics, climate impacts, and mitigation) responded to the questionnaire. Some 6550 people were invited to participate in this survey, which took place in March and April 2012. Respondents were picked because they had authored articles with the key words ‘global warming’ and/or ‘global climate change’, covering the 1991–2011 period, via the Web of Science, or were included the climate scientist database assembled by Jim Prall, or just by a survey of peer reviewed climate science articles. Prall’s database includes some 200 names that have criticized mainstream science and about half had only published in […]
😉
Joy. It’s another profoundly unscientific “consensus” study. At least one person thought that the 97% PR figure was not enough, and that magic 99.9% would sway the crowds. As if there was even one fence-sitter sitting, waiting, saying, “97% was too low…”
For the herding type of human, “consensus” is magnetically convincing. Not so for the independent minds who have seen prediction after prediction fail. If a 97% consensus on a highly complex, immature science is difficult to believe, a 99.99% one is comic. More of the same unconvincing stuff will do nothing except set off the BS meter. This new study will sway no one. The supernatural purity of it will work against “The Cause”.
A consensus is the one and only argument of the unskeptical, and they are doing it to death.
One fan, James Powell, was so enthused he spent nine months reading titles and abstracts of 24,000 papers, and found only four scientists (4!) who didn’t agree with the consensus. Some 69,402 other scientists apparently endorse “the consensus” (whatever it is) because they used the terms “climate change”, or “global warming” and they didn’t also make a clear statement that it was false, or […]
What’s more terrifying to a climate scientist than “2 degrees” of warming? Answer: Half a degree of hard questions.
Australian climate scientists don’t complain at all when the UN says it wants to redirect $89 Trillion in a quest to change the climate. But they are suddenly all concerned that the Australian Government might waste 0.0001% investigating the science. A disaster! Since when were climate scientists concerned about wasting public money? Since never.
A group of thirteen scientists, who’ve personally achieved little in the way of scientific advances, have written to Dennis Jensen and Chris Back offering to brief them on the “latest science”, afraid the skeptics might launch an inquiry into the science. The ABC calls them “prominent”: Climate change: Scientists warn sceptic MPs Dennis Jensen, Chris Back against inquiry into evidence of human influence.
Isn’t the scientific evidence the most important thing?
Surveys show half of the Australian public are skeptical — unconvinced by their claims that coal will cause a climate crisis or that solar panels can stop the storms. Right now, if the climate is headed for a disaster, nothing is more important than convincing the public. Instead, the climate scientists keep repeating that the debate […]
Consensus — slowing real science for decades
There is a surprising amount of interest in the cholesterol story of Matt Ridley’s in The Times and The Australian last week. Surprising to me anyway, because 15 years ago the other benevolent side of cholesterol was pretty clear online. Fifteen years is not a long time in human civilization, but it’s a long time in a human life. And in the case of the war on cholesterol, it’s been running for 40 years. How many people died sooner than they would have, because they followed expert advice?
Finally the official consensus on cholesterol is admitting defeat:
“Any day now, the US government will officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of “nutrients of concern” altogether. It wants also to “de-emphasise” saturated fat, given “the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular disease”. “
In the late 1990’s it was widely known online (among health zealots) that our livers are mostly in charge of our cholesterol levels, not what’s on our dinner plates. Something like 80% of the cholesterol in our blood came from our own livers, not the food we eat. Way back then, it was […]
Ooh. Here’s a bit of a backdown. Skeptics must be getting to The Guardian. Smile.
Mocking skeptics and calling them deniers has somehow failed to win them over, so the Guardian is trying a slightly new tack. This time they pretend to be balanced, and post up a list of “Myths to explode” from both sides of the debate. But don’t bring the ear-muffs, or the ambulances — these bombs are pussy-foot puff balls. The air-drops on alarmist camps are so convoluted they manage to support The Big Fear Campaign even as they try (gently-bentley!) to reign in a few excesses of the believers — don’t mention human extinction, and do remember the world has been hotter before, right? On skeptical “myths”, nothing has changed but at least they’ve stopped the namecalling (Bravo!). But it’s hard for author Hannah Devlin — she even serves up a new myth to try to squash an old one. The rate of global warming is apparently “unprecedented”, as in one-degree-in-a-century has never ever happened before, not once. How likely is that we could know the rate of global temperature swings to a tenth of a degree back in the days of dinosaurs and at […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments