Benjamin Weingarten weighs in at The Blaze.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Obesity
Here’s an idea. Let’s stop pretending that we understand it.
“Rock-Solid Science”
Some thoughts on Michael Schermer’s latest.
As I noted on Twitter yesterday, it’s kind of ironic that such a tool is head of the “Skeptic Society.” I was actually a member myself back in the eighties, until I realized that it was mostly just an excuse to bash traditional religion and push fashionable lefty causes.
[Update a while later]
Is it the “death of expertise”? Or the democraticization of it?
Considering the difference between weather and climate expertise provides an interesting example of the many dimensions of expertise that are needed to address a complex science/policy problem. It is well known that there are many professional meteorologists that are not convinced by AGW arguments. It has been argued that meteorologists are not climate experts, and hence their opinions should be discounted relative to climate experts. Well, many climate experts know nothing about climate dynamics; rather their expertise is in the area of climate impact assessment. Meteorologists generally have a very good understanding of climate variability and the natural causes of climate variability. Discounting the expertise of meteorologists in the climate debate in part has led to the current conundrum for climate science whereby natural internal climate variability has been discounted.
The broader and more significant issue of relevance to climate science expertise is the new phenomena of independent climate scientists, who have no formal training in climate science or its subfields. The emergence of Steve McIntyre as an expertise on paleoclimate proxy data and the statistical analysis of climate data was viewed by university/IPCC paleoclimate experts as an absolute affront, as evidenced by the Climategate emails. The influence of Steve McIntyre on the course of paleoclimate research and the public debate on climate science has been profound.
And not in a way that makes the Apostles happy.
The Hockey Stick
A useful history, for those who want to get up to speed. It will be a handy refresher if I somehow actually end up going to trial.
Space Journalism
Why oh why do reporters imagine that cosmologists know anything about spacecraft?
Dr Xing Li, an Aberystwyth University expert on astrophysics and cosmology, said as a scientist it would be “beautiful” to be one of SpaceShipTwo’s privileged passengers.
But SpaceShipTwo travels at a super-sonic 2,500mph – more than four times faster than a passenger jet – and Dr Li believes it’s difficult to imagine anything that goes at that speed becoming affordable.
He said: “Now we don’t have supersonic flights because of the cost issue. At the moment I don’t see that it will be possible even in 30 or 40 years. It will only happen if we have some technological advance that would bring down the cost.”
Ask a frickin’ engineer, not a scientist.
The Mann Legal Front
I’ll let Mark Steyn explain, without comment.
[Thursday-morning update]
Jonathan Adler (from his new digs at the Washington Post) provides his take.
Green Energy In Germany
German businesses are considering jumping ship for cheaper energy prices in the developing world or (gasp!) the United States. For households, these subsidies have acted like a particularly regressive tax. The poor [more] feel the bite of higher electricity bills than do the rich. Germany’s new energy and economy minister Sigmar Gabriel is expected to announce a plan to cut renewable energy subsidies later this week in an effort to keep electricity prices down. That will be a step in the right direction, but significant damage has already been done.
And all in the name of junk science and pseudo-religion.
More on the EU’s turnaround at Der Spiegel.
The Case Of The Missing Heat
Judith Curry does some detective work:
“You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.
JC comment: Well that is an interesting ‘forecast.’ If this is natural internal variability, e.g. the stadium wave (which includes the PDO), then you would expect warming to resume at some point (I’ve argued this might be in the 2030′s). This would make the hiatus 30+ years (similar in length to the pevious hiatus from 1940 to 1975). This is long enough to invalidate the utility of the current climate models for projecting future climate change.
And about the missing heat reappearing, well stay tuned for my next post on ocean heat content.
We will.
The Invisible Judith Curry
Apparently, she doesn’t fit the narrative.
[Update a while later]
Gee, maybe global warming isn’t worth doing anything about.
Yeah, may be.
[Update a few minutes later]
Curry responds to Michael Mann’s accusation that she is “anti-science.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Has the sun gone to sleep?
Who cares? After all, all these genius climate scientists have been telling us the sun doesn’t affect the climate.
[Monday-morning update]
More thoughts on the invisible Judith Curry from Donna LaFramboise.
[Bumped]
Science Is Broken
Despite the fact that it’s at Cracked, this is a very good article. Note in particular the thing about many scientists not actually understanding statistics, which is particularly a problem with climate science. It has a good bottom line:
Just to be clear: It’s not that you should suddenly stop trusting science in general — without science it would be impossible to distinguish charlatans from people who have actual wizard powers. But there’s a big difference between accepting scientific consensus and just blindly believing everything said by a guy in a white lab coat.
It’s also important to avoid falling into an overhyped misleading “consensus.”