A new paper showing what BS it is. That this kind of thing continues to be repeated is why the warm mongers have no credibility.
Category Archives: Mathematics
Orbit And Suborbit
It’s not the height, it’s the velocity.
It’s also worth noting that a suborbit can be accurately defined as an orbit that intersects the earth or its atmosphere. So even if you have orbital speed, if there’s not a sufficient horizontal component to it, you’ll still end up back on the earth before you go around.
The “97%” Nonsensus
As I noted on Twitter:
Anyone who continues to push "97%" nonsense is either pig ignorant or a lying demagogue. No other options. http://t.co/BVKTYuC3Tw
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 5, 2014
Judith Curry explains:
I think we need to declare the idea of a 97% consensus among climate scientists on the issue of climate change attribution to be dead. Verheggen’s 82-90% number is more defensible, but I’ve argued that this analysis needs to be refined.
Climate science needs to be evaluated by people outside the climate community, and this is one reason why I found Kahan’s analysis to be interesting of people who scored high on the science intelligence test. And why the perspectives of scientists and engineers from other fields are important.
As I’ve argued in my paper No consensus on consensus, a manufactured consensus serves no scientific purpose and can in fact torque the science in unfortunate ways.
And José Duarte is appropriately brutal:
James Clerk Maxwell
” target=”_blank”>biography of this underappreciated scientist.Official Unemployment Numbers
Yes, I’m shocked, too.
The 50-50 Argument
It’s not logical to state that most warming since 1950 has been caused by man (or Mann):
The glaring flaw in their logic is this. If you are trying to attribute warming over a short period, e.g. since 1980, detection requires that you explicitly consider the phasing of multidecadal natural internal variability during that period (e.g. AMO, PDO), not just the spectra over a long time period. Attribution arguments of late 20th century warming have failed to pass the detection threshold which requires accounting for the phasing of the AMO and PDO. It is typically argued that these oscillations go up and down, in net they are a wash. Maybe, but they are NOT a wash when you are considering a period of the order, or shorter than, the multidecadal time scales associated with these oscillations.
Further, in the presence of multidecadal oscillations with a nominal 60-80 yr time scale, convincing attribution requires that you can attribute the variability for more than one 60-80 yr period, preferably back to the mid 19th century. Not being able to address the attribution of change in the early 20th century to my mind precludes any highly confident attribution of change in the late 20th century.
In other words, we shouldn’t and can’t have as much confidence as many would like to push their policy agenda.
Institutionalizing Dissent
Appearing Smart In Meetings
I will confess that I have done many of these things. Though I’m also often the quiet engineer who eventually speaks up.
Thought I actually do know what “Will this scale?” means. I often ask it, seriously. No one at NASA seems to understand it, though.
Mann Suit Update
I didn’t mention it last week, because I’ve been busy dealing with life, but both we and National Review submitted our brief in the case to the DC Court of Appeals last Monday. I’m not sure if the CEI brief has been discussed anywhere, but here’s a discussion of National Review’s. We requested that the lower-court ruling to refuse dismissal be overturned and the case dismissed (implicitly) with prejudice. That means that if the appeals court agrees, we can go after Mann for legal costs.
Anyway, the reason I mention it now is that Alliance Defending Freedom has filed an amicus brief today on our behalf. I’ve got the filing, but haven’t seen any links to it yet. We also have one from Reason, Cato, Goldwater Institute, and the Individual Rights Foundation.
[Late evening update]
OK, we’ve got a couple more. One is from Newsmax Media, Inc., Free Beacon,LLC, The Foundation for Cultural Review, The Daily Caller, LLC, PJ Media, LLC, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation. The other is from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and twenty six other media organization, which I won’t list here.
Also, as with the last time, the District of Columbia has filed an amicus on our behalf to defend its anti-SLAPP law.
I’m guessing that a lot more media organizations are filing this time because they they were shocked at the ruling the last time, and wanted to make their views clear to the appellate court.
[Wednesday-morning update]
CEI has links to all the legal filings in the case to date, including Monday’s amici.
Speed Limits
A great piece on the general irrationality about them, and the history. I find most interesting (and new) the point that the main benefit of posting a speed limit was not to slow the fastest down, but to speed the slowest up. More people need to understand that it is not absolute speed that is dangerous, but relative speed. When I was young, in Michigan, before Nixon’s double-nickle stupidity, the freeway signs had both a maximum and a minimum: 70/45. That was back in the days when older cars weren’t as safe or reliable at higher speeds. Today, I’d make it more like 80/60.
I’m also glad that they (as I always do) pointed out what a problem a lack of lane discipline is. If they’d give tickets for hogging the left lane, instead of speeding, traffic would flow both more smoothly and more safely.