Category Archives: Mathematics

Business, Economics, Education, General Science, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

The Fourth National Climate Assessment

6 Comments

Anthony Watts is having fun with it.

I continue to be amazed at people who continue to attempt to compare landing a probe on another planet to predicting something as complex as the climate and the economy eight decades from now.

[Thursday-morning update]

Bjorn Lomborg: What the media got all wrong about the report.

Pretty much everything.

[Update Friday morning]

“The NCA’s projections are simply not borne out by the data.”

Unexpectedly!

[Bumped]

[Late-morning update]

How the Trump administration blew it on the NCA:

The Administration now has a problem since some Democrats say they will use the report to oppose a number of the Trump Administration’s attempts to weaken a number of the Obama climate regulations that they have proposed, including using the report to persuade courts to reinstate the original Obama Administration regulations. All this was quite foreseeable. So why did the Administration publish the report without reviewing it? Was it because it was not paying attention to what the bureaucracy was doing? This is hard to believe, but appears now to be the case. One obvious possibility is that they wanted to avoid the charge that they had “corrupted” the report writing process. But the costs are likely to be high. Another possibility is that Acting Administrator Wheeler did not want to endure questions about possible intervention at his confirmation hearing. But the evidence appears to suggest inattention by the Trump Administration was the major problem.

You don’t say.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Sea-Level Rise

8 Comments

In the context of the report released on Friday, Judith Curry has issued her own final report on it:

Why have I devoted so much time to the sea level rise issue? First, I regard sea level rise to be the most consequential potential impact of predicted global warming. Second, there is a great deal of public confusion about the issue, including decision makers. Third, a number of CFAN’s clients have queried me about a range of specific concerns that they have regarding sea level rise (and I have been doing consulting on this topic).

Why do I think an independent assessment of the sea level rise issue by yours truly is needed, given the plethora of international and national assessment reports? My clients are concerned about the alarmist predictions they have encountered. I have seen various ‘experts’ make public statements projecting 21st century sea level to be as high as 9 m [30 feet]. My clients are looking for someone that they trust to provide an objective assessment that focuses on their issues of concern.

I am not a published expert on sea level rise, although I have published some relevant papers in oceanography and the climate dynamics of the polar regions. What I bring to this assessment is a broader perspective on the issues of climate dynamics, climate modeling and uncertainty than most of the community working on the sea level rise issue. In any event, it is arguably useful for a knowledgeable person outside of the publishing sea level community to provide an independent assessment.

Yes. It will be interesting to see the response from the alarmists, if any.

Business, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Admitting Mistakes

11 Comments

…”in a hostile environment.” Some thoughts from Judith Curry:

Ralph Keeling behaved with honesty and dignity by publicly admitting these errors and thanking Nic Lewis.

Such behavior shouldn’t be news, however; it is how all scientists should behave, always.

Imagine how the course of climate science and the public debate on climate change would be different if Michael Mann would have behaved in a similar way in response to McIntyre and McKitrick’s identification of problems with the hockey stick analysis.

I don’t think he’s capable of it.

By quickly admitting mistakes and giving credit where due, Ralph Keeling has done something unusual and laudatory in the field of climate science. If all climate scientists behaved this way, there would be no ‘hostile environment.’

I find it to be a sad state of affairs when a scientist admitting mistakes gets more kudos than the scientist actually finding the mistakes. But given the state of climate science, I guess finding mistakes seems to be a more common story than a publishing scientist actually admitting to mistakes.

Sadly, yes.

Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Fauxcahontas’s DNA

42 Comments

It shows that she’s heap big authentic.

[Update Wednesday afternoon]

Warren’s Clintonian smoke signals.

It’s worth noting that Warren brought on a lot of these tropes about Siberian Americans with her “Powwow Chow.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Actual descendant of Pocahontas to Warren: Apologize.

I suspect that the fraud will keep doubling down.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

Cherokee Nation to Elizabeth Warren: Drop dead.

Unlikely she’ll do that, either, but rarely has someone so publicly pwned themselves.

[Saturday morning]

Blackface America:

America is a wonderfully mixed-up place. You meet somebody named Qiáng MacFarland Lopez and the safe bet is that he’s an American. And many of us have had the peculiar experience of feeling a strong sense of kinship with a culture that is not our own. (That’s me in a Swiss train station.) “Multiculturalism” is an intellectual dead end, but culture is not, and there is much to be said for learning Chinese or Hebrew or Nahuatl, reading the great Spanish novels, or coming to understand Buddhism as something more than a feel-good corporate trend.

To consider oneself fixed within the bounds of one’s own specific patrimony is an intellectual poverty. But Senator Warren has not dug into Cherokee history, language, or culture. She simply used the fiction of her Cherokee identity to get something she wanted — a little political leg up on the rest of the sanctimonious white ladies. That’s cheap, vulgar, and wrong — and the Cherokee are right to be annoyed by it. And if Texas Democrats really want a Hispanic name on the ballot to put up against Senator Cruz, then they might consider — here’s a radical thought! — nominating someone of Hispanic heritage as their candidate. As for Rachel Dolezal — my best guess is that being Rachel Dolezal is its own punishment.

I don’t think the Democrats understand how sane people view all this stuff (not to mention all the gender insanity).

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

1.5 Degrees C

18 Comments

Thoughts on the latest non-news from Judith Curry:

IMO, even with erroneous attribution of extreme weather/climate events and projections using climate models that are running too hot and not fit for purpose of projecting 21st century climate change, the IPCC still has not made a strong case for this massive investment to prevent 1.5C warming.

No kidding.

Business, Culinary, Education, General Science, Health, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Nutrition “Science”

2 Comments

A fraud is exposed, but it’s a much larger problem:

Data dredging is fairly common in health research, and especially in studies involving food. It is one reason contradictory nutrition headlines seem to be the norm: One week coffee, cheese and red wine are found to be protective against heart disease and cancer, and the next week a new crop of studies pronounce that they cause it. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said that many researchers are under enormous pressure to churn out papers. One recent analysis found that thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days.

I liked this:

“P-hacking is a really serious problem,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, a co-founder of Retraction Watch, who teaches medical journalism at New York University. “Not to be overly dramatic, but in some ways it throws into question the very statistical basis of what we’re reading as science journalists and as the public.”

You don’t say.

It goes far beyond nutrition. A lot of drug research is based on this sort of thing as well, including the statin scam.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Jerry Brown

4 Comments

…is nuts:

“We’re fighting nature with the amount of material we’re putting in the environment, and that material traps heat, and the heat fosters fires, and the fires keep burning,” he said.

The governor added that “since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is.”

“Some people don’t want to accept that, some just outright deny it,” Brown continued. “I don’t say it with any great joy here – we’re in for a very rough ride. It’s going to get expensive. It’s going to get dangerous, and we have to apply all our creativity to make the best of what is going to be an increasingly bad situation, not just for California, but for people all over America and all over the world.”

Brown said the state’s budget would also have to figure in the cost of increased fire fury in the upcoming years. “So far, this fire activity is a small part of our very large budget, but it is growing and it will continue to grow as we adapt to the changing weather,” he said.

The governor said that steps to combat global warming can still, eventually, “shift the weather back to where it historically was.”

Uh huh.

[Late-morning update]

[Noon update]

More history from Joe Bastardi.