Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

So Let Me Get This Straight

99 Comments

The entire world has been assured that the “science was settled” that the last decade had been the hottest in recorded times, and that it was unprecedented, and it was surely caused by our breathing and SUV driving, and that we had to dramatically increase the cost of energy, reduce our own income, and keep the Third World in poverty (or transfer vast amounts of our own wealth to them), because the head of the Climate Research Unit kept a messy office?

You know, I keep a messy office, too, but then, I’ve never tried to remake the entire world on the basis of my analyses. (Off planet is a different story…)

This really is an amazing story. As I’ve been saying, the people who have been skeptical have been the true scientists, and the warm mongers betrayers of science, for power and politics.

And where is Al Gore? In fact, where is the American press?

[Wee-hour update]

More from The Times:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

You don’t say.

And why isn’t anyone reporting on this on this side of the Pond?

[Monday morning update]

The WaPo is finally showing up to the party. Still no sign of the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record, though.

[Monday evening update — I’m home from Colorado…]

Climaquiddick (I wish that people would quit calling it Climategate…) reminds Instapundit of the Michael Bellesiles scandal. Me too.

Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up. His work was based on probate records, and when people tried to find them, it turned out that many didn’t exist (one data set he claimed to have used turned out, on review, to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake). It also turned out that Bellesiles hadn’t even visited some of the archives he claimed to have researched. When challenged to produce his data, he was unable to do so, and offered unpersuasive stories regarding why.

Well, on second thought, there are no parallels at all…

General Science, History, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Iron Rush

10 Comments

Did a meteorite find drive the Inuit migration across Canada hundreds of years ago?

Nah, couldn’t be. Nothing that happens in space is relevant to what happens on earth.

For some reason, this reminds me of the global warming debate. Not to mention the difficulty that Alverez had in selling the dinosaur extinction theory.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is also an interesting example of how technology, or the desire for it, can influence human migration patterns. It may have some relevance to space policy…

Education, Philosophy, Science And Society

The Failure Of Intelligent Design

27 Comments

Some thoughts:

…whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God. This conception of design plays right into the hands of atheists, whose caricature of religion has always been that it is a substitute for the scientific understanding of nature.

The ID movement has also rubbed a very raw wound in the relation between science and religion. For decades scientists have had to fend off the attempts by Young Earth creationists to promote their ideas as a valid alternative science. The scientific world’s exasperation with creationists is understandable. Imagine yourself a serious historian in a country where half the population believed in Afrocentric history, say, or a serious political scientist in a country where half the people believed that the world is run by the Bilderberg Group or the Rockefellers. It would get to you after a while, especially if there were constant attempts to insert these alternative theories into textbooks. So, when the ID movement came along and suggested that its ideas be taught in science classrooms, it touched a nerve. This is one reason that the New Atheists attracted such a huge audience.

It is indeed frustrating to argue about science and evolution with people who understand neither. And they don’t realize how much damage they do to their cause.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

What A Concept

30 Comments

If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code:

…if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.

So would, and do I. A large part of the gullibility of the general public and the media on this subject is that it doesn’t understand how computers, and programming works.

I also find it ironic that econometrics is much more rigorous, in terms of the need to present code for publication, about this than climate “science.”

[Update a few minutes later]

There’s a discussion at Slashdot about this. FWIW.

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

The Great IPCC Meltdown

6 Comments

…continues:

When the glacier story broke, IPCC apologists returned over and over again to a saving grace. The bogus glacier report appeared in the body of the IPCC document, but not in the much more carefully vetted Synthesis Report, in which the IPCC’s senior leadership made its specific recommendations to world leaders. So it didn’t matter that much, the apologists told us, and we can still trust the rigorously checked and reviewed Synthesis Report.

But that’s where the African rain crisis prediction is found — in the supposedly sacrosanct Synthesis Report.

So: the Synthesis Report contains a major scare prediction — 50% shortfall in North African food production just ten years from now — and there is no serious, peer-reviewed evidence that the prediction is true.

But there’s more. Much, much more.

You wonder at what point, if any, the warm-monger worshippers will realize that they’ve been scammed?

And as Mark Steyn notes (again), it’s not just a science scandal, it’s a scandal of gross journalism malpractice.

[Update a few minutes later]

Time to follow the money.

Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Good For Them

5 Comments

India has set up its own body to monitor climate change, because it can’t rely on the IPCC.

I think it’s going to be very difficult to set up such a thing that won’t be politicized. The economic and power stakes are simply too high.

[Update a couple minutes later]

What is really melting is their credibility. Well, that’s certainly indisputable, though I suspect that there will be a lot of skeptics and deniers among the watermelons.

[Update a few minutes later]

Why climate science is on trial, and investigation of actual criminal liability in England.

Really, as I wrote when the story first broke, it is the people who propose to pauperize us in furtherance of their political agenda, based on falsified data and flawed techniques, who are the real criminals:

…when scientists become politicians but continue to pretend to be doing science, that is the real crime. The theory being promoted by these men was being used to justify government actions that would result in greatly diminished future economic growth of the most powerful economy on earth (and the rest of the world as well). It would make it more difficult and less affordable to address any real problems that might be caused in the future by a change in climate, whether due to human activity or other causes. It could impoverish millions in the future, with little actual change in adverse climate effects. And when such a theory has the potential to do so much unjustified harm, and it has a fraudulent basis, who are the real criminals against humanity?

I think that the scam is over. I certainly hope so.