Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The “Ensemble” Of Climate Models

Is completely, statistically, meaningless:

Saying that we need to wait for a certain interval in order to conclude that “the models are wrong” is dangerous and incorrect for two reasons. First — and this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!

This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above, where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.

This is not science. In many ways, it is the antithesis of it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Mannsuit

5 Comments

The hearing for dismissal ended a while ago in DC. Now we’re just waiting for a ruling from the judge.

[Update a while later]

Note: it could be weeks before we get a ruling. The law says that it should be prompt, but that’s what it said about the hearing as well, and it’s been months since we filed (today’s hearing was originally scheduled for mid-April). But as long as there is no ruling, the case doesn’t move forward.

Culinary, Health, Science And Society

High Blood Pressure

5 Comments

So I’m looking at the reviews of this book over at Amazon, and while it gets lots of praise, there’s a very big omission — no one says that it actually worked for them. If it does, I’ll pick up a copy, but that’s my primary criteriaon — does it work? Not what her credentials are.

In my case, I don’t eat bananas because I think they’re too starchy. There are other ways of getting potassium (one thing I’ve done is to not only cut way back on salt, but to only use sea salt, which also provides other salts than just sodium chloride).

[Update a while later]

Also, I’m not sure there’s any evidence that exercise helps.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science

National Space Policy

17 Comments

A “Values-Based Approach“? The question is — what are the values? I think he’s got it wrong:

Discovery is why a nation should go to space. It is what inspires all of humanity. It has been NASA’s only use of human spaceflight in the post-Apollo era that has returned value that is highly regarded by nearly all people in developed countries with free access to information. The synergy that once existed between human-assisted and robotic space exploration in the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program is a blueprint for sustained deep space human-assisted exploration that can stoke the nation’s competitiveness in science, technology, and math toward realization of long-term financial and physical security.

That’s an opinion, not a fact. I would expect a scientist to think that science is the reason for human spaceflight, but most people don’t agree with him (or have even given it much thought). If it’s not for the purpose of developing and settling space, the amount of money we’re spending on it is unjustifiable.