Category Archives: Science And Society

Political Commentary, Science And Society

“Settled Science”

2 Comments

Discover has an interview with Judith Curry, who has been one of the few people in the climate “science” community behaving with any integrity:

Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?

Yes. The IPCC itself doesn’t recommend policies or whatever; they just do an assessment of the science. But it’s sort of framed in the context of the UNFCCC [the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change]. That’s who they work for, basically. The UNFCCC has a particular policy agenda—Kyoto, Copenhagen, cap-and-trade, and all that—so the questions that they pose at the IPCC have been framed in terms of the UNFCCC agenda. That’s caused a narrowing of the kind of things the IPCC focuses on. It’s not a policy-free assessment of the science. That actually torques the science in certain directions, because a lot of people are doing research specifically targeted at issues of relevance to the IPCC. Scientists want to see their papers quoted in the IPCC report.

But don’t say there’s confirmation bias.

Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

Back To The Drawing Board?

21 Comments

I’ve never been a big fan of nuking asteroids, but this test should cause some concern:

Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Catherine Plesko of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico simulated blowing up asteroids 1 kilometre across. When the speed of dispersal was relatively low, it took only hours for the fragments to coalesce into a new rock.

“The high-speed stuff goes away but the low-speed stuff reassembles [in] 2 to 18 hours,” Korycansky says. The simulations were presented (pdf) last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

So you have to have a big enough bomb to really do the job. I think there are better, more controllable ways.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate Hoax

10 Comments

Like Joe Katzman, I don’t think that’s too strong a word for it any more. Steve Hayward has an extensive roundup of all the problems at the IPCC (though I could have done without the naked Al Gore picture).

Also, remember how we were told, even by warm mongering commenters here, that the CRU data didn’t matter because we had GISS?

Nope.

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.

Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.

The reporter never published it.

Of course not. Didn’t fit the template.

Hansen should be drummed out of the global “science” community, if they want to regain any credibility.

[Update a few minutes later]

As I’ve noted before, this isn’t just a science scandal, it’s a media scandal. If they were fooled by these charlatans, it’s because they wanted to be.

[Late morning update]

More from Chris Horner — three of the four data sets are irrevocably tainted. But the faithful will not waver in their religion.

[Early afternoon update]

A video interview with Chris Horner — the climate cover up spreads to NASA.

Media Criticism, Science And Society

The Science Is Settled

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A giant asteroid hit really did kill the dinosaurs.

OK, the title is a joke (on the warm mongers) — the phrase “the science is settled” is an oxymoron, and goes against the very nature of science. But there does seem to be a growing “consensus” (another scientific oxymoron) that Louis Alverez got it right three decades ago. The initial resistance, it always seemed to me, to be resistance to the notion by paleontologists, who were extremely terracentric, that something extraterrestrial could have such a sudden and catastrophic effect on the planet and its most dominant order. It didn’t help that it was in a field far outside their domain.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

“The Science Is Settled”

5 Comments

…they told Copernicus.

[Late morning update]

Several “scientists” are continuing to plot attacks on the “deniers.” And they’re being led by Paul Ehrlich, one of the most discredited pseudoscientific totalitarian doom’n’gloomers in modern history? It doesn’t help that the president’s current science advisor was one of his protégés.

These folks have apparently never learned the old rule about holes.

Education, Political Commentary, Science And Society

It Should Have Been Folklore And Mythology

8 Comments

Notorious con artist and fraud Al Gore is going to be given an honorary doctorate by the University of Tennessee:

Gore will receive the degree — an Honorary Doctor of Laws and Humane Letters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology — at the spring commencement exercises of the College of Arts and Sciences on May 14.

Instapundit is likely quite embarrassed.

[Late afternoon update]

You know, I think that this is pretty much a guarantee that UT commencement is going to be snowed out this spring.

General, Science And Society

Cookie Chemistry

I have to say that I was a little surprised to read that she didn’t consider baking soda first, because that’s what seemed obvious to me reading of her travails. But I assumed until reading the comments that it was so obvious that she hadn’t bothered to mention that attempt at a fix.

On a personal note, this past Christmas might have been the first season that I didn’t make Christmasholiday butter cookies using my mother’s half-century-old cookie gun, due to the continuing discombobulation of the move from Florida, and our trip to Colorado for house renovation.