Science « JoNova

Science is not done by peer or pal review, but by evidence and reason

The termination of the Pattern Recognition journal ought to be PR gold for skeptics. Nothing like this happens to unskeptical scientists, ever. It’s a telling spectacle.

A major science publisher gasped in horror that one amongst its scores of journals had “doubted the IPCC”, so the journal had to be axed forever. Oh the Crime! The over-the-top dummy-spit exposes the religious zeal in a supposedly scientific process. So much for the hallowed “Peer Review”. Fans of establishment science want us to believe it’s a gospel part of the scientific method, but it is neither intrinsic nor essential, and skeptics should not be fooled into thinking it is.

Peer reviewed papers may be gems or junk but we won’t know which by discussing who reviewed them.

Let’s follow due process in science, but that is not by review whether peer-or-pal, it’s by prediction, test, observation, and repeat.

Some people seem to have lost sight of this, and think that skeptics ought to be trying to play the Peer Review Game according to the fine print of arbitrary rules dictated by unscientists who hate skeptics and who don’t even play by the rules themselves. The game belongs to them — they set, […]

Brave brave CSIRO climate scientists willing to bet on “any warming above zero”

So how sure are they of their climate model predictions? So sure they demand we pay billions but when it comes to betting their own money, the modelers are all bravado over the chance to bet on any warming “above zero” 20 years from now.

The Guardian:

Some of Australia’s top climate scientists, including those from the CSIRO, have said they will be willing to bet Tony Abbott’s business adviser Maurice Newman $10,000 that the world will warm over the next 20 years.

These gutsy scientists are offering bets that the climate “might” warm, and which might pay out to a man who will be 95 at their completion. The Guardian takes them seriously?

Here’s an offer to those climate scientists, yes I’m interested in a bet, for sure, but I won’t be offering you a shot at winning in a situation where you predict (and we pay to prevent) far more warming than you are willing to bet on. Hypocrisy what? Your own models are abject failures, and we are forced to pay for policies fueled by your failures and your salary as well.

So show you have the balls and come and talk about a real bet […]

Weekend Unthreaded

So much going on…

7.3 out of 10 based on 31 ratings

Science paper doubts IPCC, so whole journal gets terminated!

…

In extraordinary news, the scientific journal Pattern Recognition in Physics has been unexpectedly terminated, a “drastic decision” taken just ten months after it started.

The publisher appears to be shocked that in a recent special issue the scientists expressed doubt about the accelerated warming predicted by the IPCC. For the crime of not bowing before the sacred tabernacle, apparently the publishers suddenly felt the need to distance themselves, and in the most over-the-top way. The reasons they gave had nothing to do with the data, the logic, and they cite no errors. There can be no mistake, this is about enforcing a permitted line of thought.

I must say, it’s a brilliant (if a tad expensive) way to draw attention to a scientific paper. It’s the Barbara-Streisland moment in science. Forget “withdrawn”, forget “retracted”, the new line in the sand is to write a paper so hot they have to terminate the whole journal! Skeptics could hardly come up with a more electric publicity campaign.

Naturally, as with all good Barbara-Streisland-moves intended to suppress information, as soon as I heard, the first thing I did was to seek out and download copies of all the papers. Right now, […]

I already have a climate bet with a Brian Schmidt, I’d like to do another

[See the concise and updating story of our bet with the US Brian Schmidt here.]

Brian Schmidt offered to bet against Maurice Newman, but what’s interesting is just how startlingly weak and underconfident the bet is.

How times have changed. In 2007 the IPCC seemed to be 90% confident that the world would warm by about 0.4 degrees over the next two decades. Now Brian Schmidt braves up to offer a bet of “anything above zero”. Is he really a sceptic? It appears so.

How much should we pay now to prevent “any warming above zero” in the next twenty years? $4.5 billion a year? How about nothing.

I sent something similar to this to three Australian editors yesterday, unfortunately at least two were out of the office. Holiday season.

As Australia’s largest sceptical climate blogger, I would be delighted to take up Brian’s offer of a bet (made to Maurice Newman).

Here’s the bizarre thing, I’m already a party to one of the largest bets on global temperatures, and would you believe, with a man also called Brian Schmidt? (My husband, David Evans, carved out that bet long ago in 2007, and as it happens, […]

Forgotten: Historic hot temperatures recorded with detail and care in Adelaide

What I found most interesting about this was the skill, dedication and length of meteorological data taken in the 1800’s. When our climate is “the most important moral challenge” why is it there is so little interest in our longest and oldest data?

Who knew that one of the most meticulous and detailed temperature records in the world from the 1800’s comes from Adelaide, largely thanks to Sir Charles Todd. The West Terrace site in Adelaide was one of the best in the world at the time, and provides accurate historic temperatures from “Australia’s first permanent weather bureau at Adelaide in 1856″. (Rainfall records even appear to go as far back as 1839.) Lance Pidgeon went delving into the National Archives and was surprised at what he found.

If we want to understand our climate the records from the 1800’s in Adelaide are surely worth attention?

The BOM usually shows graphs like this one below starting in 1911. You might think you are looking at the complete history of Adelaide temperatures and that smoothed temperature is rising inexorably, but the historic records remain unseen. While “hottest” ever records are proclaimed […]

Warmists Are Never Wrong, Even When Supporting Genocide

Brandon Shollenberger writes a follow up of the survey last week that was inspired by Stephen Lewandowsky’s work (thanks to all the people who helped fill it out). Note the footnote and the background reading, before commenting. 😉 – Jo

Warmists Are Never Wrong, Even When Supporting Genocide Brandon Shollenberger

Global warming proponents support genocide. That may seem hard to believe, but remember, they’ve said it’d be right to blow up dams and burn cities to the ground:

Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage. If carried out willingly and on a sufficiently large scale, this process would require dismantling many of the key components of civilization; no person would be foolish enough to cut off their own limbs unless they were suffering from some kind of psychotic delusion, and no civilization would be willing to remove many of the pillars of its own existence. Looking from […]

Newman says The Party is Over for the IPCC

Another sign the debate is shifting, and probably in an irreversible way. Like a ratchet, the truth is slowly advancing, but once revealed, there is no going back.

The debate is gaining nuance: instead of scientists and deniers, there the public starts to see the argument is about shades of grey. The real debate has never been about whether greenhouse gases were real, instead it’s about how much global warming will happen. The cheating tactic of pretending the conflict was about something that nearly everyone agrees upon is like a ticking bomb for alarmists. The fuse has been lit. They will pay for their deception eventually.

Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, is following up on his extraordinary front page article in The Australian. He is influential and was Chairman of the ABC, and of the board of the Australian Stock Exchange, and was Chancellor of Macquarie University until 2008.

Maurice Newman in The Australian today:

GIVEN the low-grade attacks on me following my piece “Crowds go cold on climate cost” (The Australian, Dec 31) readers of Fairfax publications and The Guardian may be shocked to hear I believe in climate change. I also accept carbon […]

199,984 comments… tick tick tick (Plus almost half a million people visited in 2013)

The 200,000 comment mark has crept up on me. Not long to go…

For the record there were 496,107 “unique visitors” to this site during 2013.

All told, the crowd spent 23,703 person-hours on this blog last year.

(Who is reading? See these comments).

I’m grateful to the commenters for generating such an avid conversation.

Thank you especially to the volunteer moderators who look out for me and make this possible.

Thank you to the people who donated in support. It is brilliantly useful, Cheers!

My favorite posts.

Gratefully, — Jo

UPDATE: JoNova Alexa ranking globally is 78,819 (similar to GWPF 80,292; Bishop Hill 102,464; Climate Audit 84,996). This site’s rank in Australia a very good 2,015. (Lower is better). Congrats WUWT global rank 10,250.

Right now, I’m getting 30% of my traffic from the UK, which is surprising.

9.6 out of 10 based on 83 ratings

Your funds used to hide deception — the BBC’s 28Gate coverup becomes mainstream news

First they take your money to force their opinions over you.

Then they take your money to hide what they were doing, because they knew what they were doing was wrong.

It was a turning point in BBC coverage. The 2006 seminar with “climate experts” turned out to be mostly a workshop with Greenpeace, industry activists and lobbyists. It was the point the BBC dropped even the pretense of impartial news reporting on the climate. After this “high-level” seminar the Beeb announced it didn’t need balance in the climate debate. Then having made out they were so scientific and honorable, they spent the next six years burning more money to hide the names of the experts from the public that paid for them.

Is there any better argument to explain why state funded media is not just a waste of money, but irresponsible, immoral and unethical political advertising?

There is no saving the BBC. Over the last decade climate change was supposedly the “biggest scientific” challenge for the world, and a massive cost to the citizens who were falsely told they needed to change the weather. More than ever, public funds should have been used to analyze both sides of […]

Germany’s Greens help the coal industry, while the US cut emissions by ignoring the greens

Oh the dilemma. German Greens have been so “successful” that coal use is rising fast. They helped get rid of the nukes in 2011, punished coal, and subsidized “renewables”. But woe…. energy has to come from somewhere, so the paradoxical crunch comes. Green policies mean that everyone is poorer, but the cheapest energy comes from coal …

The coal industry must be praying for more Green activism:

“IT’S been a black Christmas for green thinkers as Germany, the world leader in rooftop solar and pride of the renewable energy revolution has confirmed its rapid return to coal.

After scrapping nuclear power, Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions are back on the rise as the country clamours to reopen some of the dirtiest brown coalmines that have been closed since the reunification of east and west. The Australian

Though some say the problem is “carbon credits” are too cheap. (We need to be poorer?)

“…new figures show that coal power output in 2013 reached its highest level in more than 20 years. Researchers blame cheap CO2 emissions permits, and demand urgent reforms.

The stats: Germany is using almost as much coal as it did in 1990:

In 1990, Germany’s brown coal-fired […]

Testing the Lewandowsky methodology with a poll

Brandon Schollenberger wants to test a theory, so he has made a short poll. He would like a broad sample.

The message:

As you’re aware, Stephan Lewandowsky has written several papers claiming to have found certain traits amongst global warming skeptics. I believe his methodology is fundamentally flawed. I believe a flaw present in his methodology is also present in the work of many others.

To test my belief, I’m seeking participants for a short survey (13 questions). The questions are designed specifically to test a key aspect of Lewandowsky’s methodology. The results won’t be published in any scientific journal, but I’ll do a writeup on them once the survey is closed and share it online.

(click below)

The Poll (closed now)

UPDATE Brandon says thanks, he has thousands of responses. The poll is not open any more.

(Or copy the link — http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=jblyccj8lluam18284546)

This poll has appeared at WUWT and Bishop Hill. Feel free to do it (it is very short) or share the link with others.

There are only 13 points arranged as three questions. Click “Next Page” to finish.

8.2 out of 10 based on 68 […]

Readfearn and The Guardian: Science is one big long ad-hom

Maurice Newman’s frank Op-Ed broke lots of rules last week — he used the words “fraud”, “deception”, and the IPCC on the front page of a major national daily paper. But the response to it has been a lower grade of apoplectic than what we are accustomed too. Which says something about the debate. Tick tick tick…

Graham Readfearn, journalist, has had nearly a whole week to summarize the strongest rebuttals around the world and he’s come up with 600 words of lame names. Newman is a “dizzy” denier, with “tricks on the brain”, and a “conspiracy dial”. Where is the science? Even as ad homs go that is barrel-scraping.

The Readfearn reasoning amounts to saying that Newman is either wrong because he is an old white guy (let’s be ageist, sexist and rascist eh?), or he is wrong because he cited Roy Spencer who is wrong because he’s a Christian. Thus and verily, ergo, ergot and a truffle too, climate sensitivity on Planet Earth is 3.3 degrees C.

If Spencer had been a Muslim would Readfearn have spent 6 paragraphs mocking the awkward conflicts with science and the Koran? Perhaps not. Instead he might have had to fill 6 […]

Matt Ridley on Tamiflu-gate. Hidden data, omitted trials, “like the Hockey Stick Graph”

Matt Ridley looks at pharmaceutical research and finds problems of confirmation bias, lack of access to data, and lack of replication of results. He compares it to the hockey stick debacle which is rising in notoriety to become the new benchmark of bad science. Articles like this are especially useful, because people concerned about Tamiflu might not know anything about the HockeyStick, and might not have read an article about the climate.

In Pharmaceutical research companies may do many studies on a drug but only choose to publish the ones with results they feel better about.

The Australian

PERHAPS it should be called Tamiflugate. Yet the doubts reported by Britain’s House of Commons public accounts committee last week go well beyond the possible waste of nearly half a billion pounds ($913 million) on a flu drug that might not be much better than paracetamol. All sorts of science are contaminated with the problem of cherry-picked data.

Science at a breaking point:

The problem seems widespread. A paper in the BMJ in 2012 reported that only one fifth of clinical trials financed by the US National Institutes of Health released summaries of their results within the required one year […]

Not-the-Weekend Unthreaded

Sorry, I’ll be back soon…

6.8 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

There goes another consensus. Crash diets solve diabetes in 3 weeks

Sometimes the consensus deniers are right, which is exactly why the term is so pointless and so profoundly unscientific.

The medical associations were unequivocal. Crash diets were a fad, unhealthy, and only slow sensible weight loss could work. So millions of people were fed expensive drugs for decades, monitored, and some even given risky bariatric surgery. Patients with Type II diabetes were expected to be treated for years, or possibly the rest of their lives. Nearly a tenth of the national health budget of the UK was spent managing diabetes. Fully 8% of the population have the condition in the US.

Now a new (albeit very very small) study cured diabetes in some cases in as little as a week with a diet that was thought to be bad.

In the trial the very low calorie diet was done for 8 weeks. Sticking to 600 calories a day is not easy (some reports say it was 800 cals). It’s about a quarter of what a normal guy would eat. But it shrinks fat in the pancreas and liver, and that seemingly returns insulin levels to normal. The really amazing thing is that the benefits turn out to stay around far […]

Michael Asten’s novel idea – think first, spend later?

It’s amazing what sensible things turn up in the holiday period. The Australian not only published Maurice Newman skeptical discussion: “climate madness, dishonesty and fraud”, but two days later they published a scientist talking about natural cycles. The scandal! He’s introduced a new term into the debate: …”residual” anthropogenic driven climate change. Instead of CAGW*, we have RAGW. It’s a term that I could grow to like.

Michael Asten, professor of geophysics at Monash University, is suggesting the Australian government’s “Direct Action Scheme” ought to start with science. (How radical.) Before we spend $5 billion we ought to spend a small part of that on looking at whether we need to spend the rest of it. It’s a starkly obvious point, but almost never said. More than anything, both the environment and the people of Australia need some action, and it starts with reviewing the research. Where is the cost benefit study on climate action?

Bring science to climate policy

The Australian

THE Senate inquiry probing the direct action scheme to reduce CO2 emissions provides opportunity for a review not only of the Coalition’s scheme but its underlying justification. Just as the National Broadband Network has been subjected to rigorous […]

French Polar Chief slams SpiritofMawson fiasco

This really has been a PR debacle of amazing proportions. The ship stuck in ice has captured something larger than I would have expected. Methinks the timing must be apropos.

Good scientists are distancing themselves from the publicity hungry climate lightweights and commentators on both sides of the fence are agreeing in their criticism.

A third effect we are barely starting to see may ripple on for months — that’s when mass-media victims realize that the “Russian Tourist ship” was really a boat load of Australian and New Zealander scientists, paid for mostly by taxpayers and loaded and advised by supposedly “expert” climate scientists. This misinformation was despite the boat having BBC, and Guardian media on board, and Fairfax press in one of the rescue icebreakers. Today I see evidence of the first two effects.

From Skynews. The French chief of polar science calls the Spirit of Mawson trip “pseudo-scientific” and laments the effect it is having on real research.

The head of France’s polar science institute has voiced fury at the misadventures of a Russian ship trapped in Antarctic ice, deriding what he called a tourists’ trip that had diverted resources from real science.

In an interview with AFP, […]

Australian taxpayers will pay $400,000 cost for climate scientist’s ship stuck in ice. Total cost “millions”.

The saga just keeps going. The Chinese Icebreaker is now also stuck, and has asked for help so the Aurora Australis with 52 extra passengers rescued from the Russian Charter boat have to stay nearby to help. Twenty two Russian sailors are still trapped on board the Russian boat — the Akademik Sholaskiy. Plus other scientists in Antarctica still don’t have their equipment. Costs for everyone involved are continuing to rise. Though there is a free-for-all on social media…

Image first seen at Elmer Beauregard@m4gw

But seriously, trom The Australian by Graham Lloyd:

TAXPAYERS will foot a $400,000 bill for the rescue of a group of climate scientists, tourists and journalists from a stranded Russian research vessel – an operation that has blown the contingency budget of Australia’s Antarctic program and disrupted its scientific work.

The Antarctic Division in Hobart said it was revising plans and considering airlifting urgently needed scientific equipment that could not be unloaded from Aurora Australis before the ship was diverted from the Casey base to rescue the novice ice explorers just before Christmas.

The climate scientists and passengers aren’t free yet, their boat is waiting around to help the Chinese icebreaker.

[…]

Akademik Shokalskiy: were those careless risks in dangerous but foreseeable conditions?

It is good news that the climate scientists, PhD’s, children, tourists and media are finally safe on board the Aurora Australia (though I note the webcam this morning still shows that boat surrounded by sea ice). Spare a thought for the sailors still on board the Shokalskiy.

Shub Niggurath writes to me today to explain that the ill-fated ship headed back to an area heavy with ice, knowing a storm was approaching. The ships captain had wanted to get away sooner, but was delayed because the expedition team was late returning due to a mechanical mishap. The details of that delay are below. Further down I note a New Zealand writer argues they were taking “undue risk” because sea ice data and wind data were available that “shows the ice didn’t come out of nowhere – nor from a sudden chill.”

Pierre Gosslin asks on his site why the organizers used a cheap “ice strengthened” boat that was not able to break ice, yet sold berths to inexperienced tourists, and ventured into major sea ice zones.

Looks like the Antarctic team was unlucky to get nice weather with less wind. I marvel that the Commonwealth Bay and Cape Denison area […]

JoNova

Recent Posts

Science is not done by peer or pal review, but by evidence and reason

Brave brave CSIRO climate scientists willing to bet on “any warming above zero”

Weekend Unthreaded

Science paper doubts IPCC, so whole journal gets terminated!

I already have a climate bet with a Brian Schmidt, I’d like to do another

Forgotten: Historic hot temperatures recorded with detail and care in Adelaide

Warmists Are Never Wrong, Even When Supporting Genocide

Newman says The Party is Over for the IPCC

199,984 comments… tick tick tick (Plus almost half a million people visited in 2013)

Your funds used to hide deception — the BBC’s 28Gate coverup becomes mainstream news

Germany’s Greens help the coal industry, while the US cut emissions by ignoring the greens

Testing the Lewandowsky methodology with a poll

Readfearn and The Guardian: Science is one big long ad-hom

Matt Ridley on Tamiflu-gate. Hidden data, omitted trials, “like the Hockey Stick Graph”

Not-the-Weekend Unthreaded

There goes another consensus. Crash diets solve diabetes in 3 weeks

Michael Asten’s novel idea – think first, spend later?

French Polar Chief slams SpiritofMawson fiasco

Australian taxpayers will pay $400,000 cost for climate scientist’s ship stuck in ice. Total cost “millions”.

Akademik Shokalskiy: were those careless risks in dangerous but foreseeable conditions?

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