Category Archives: Science And Society

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

Climate “Denial”

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Making nonsense of it:

It is clear from all this that Cook et al. are UNFCCC/IPCC ideologues. There is nothing wrong per se with ideology; it is the ideologues that are the problem – absence of doubt, intolerance of debate, appeal to authority, desire to convince others of the ideological “truth”, and a willingness to punish those that don’t concur. They need to look in the mirror and understand their own motivated reasoning.

Phil Plait is such a disappointment on this topic.

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

Climate Change And Extreme Weather

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People like Seth Borenstein were excited to link to this paper yesterday.

“This new study helps get the actual probability or odds of human influence,” said University of Arizona climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn’t part of the research. “This is key: If you don’t like hot temperature extremes that we’re getting, you now know how you can reduce the odds of such events by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Lead author Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, and colleague Reto Knutti examined just the hottest of hot days, the hottest one-tenth of one percent. Using 25 different computer models. Fischer and Knutti simulated a world without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and found those hot days happened once every three years.

Then they calculated how many times they happen with the current level of heat-trapping gases and the number increases to four days. So three of the four are human caused, the team said.

This is crap science, because it’s based on crap models, that have been failing.

Interestingly, even Kevin Trenberth agrees with me:

“The paper is interesting and has some results that may be reasonably OK,” he said. “However, the paper is based almost entirely on models with little or no validation or relations to the real world. None of the models do precipitation realistically, and some are quite bad.”

You don’t say. Garbage in, garbage out.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Personhood For Non-Humans

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Elizabeth Price Foley is appalled at some recent court decisions, and the trend.

I’ve got mixed feelings on this. I agree that they shouldn’t be given full human rights, but I do think we should make distinctions as a function of intelligence, and perhaps even recognize some degree of moral agency (e.g., dolphins). It also raises the issue of how we would treat extraterrestrials as a function of those things.

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

“Deniers” And Ideologues

6 Comments

Judith Curry’s warning to Bjorn Stevens: “In my quest to objectively evaluate the IPCC’s attribution argument and stand up for research integrity post Climategate, I was not ‘pulled’ away from the establishment community by ‘deniers’; rather I was ‘pushed’ away by scientists who were IPCC ideologues and advocates. Watch out.”