Climate change

From Peter Ellerton at RealClearScience: Claims that the “the science isn’t settled” with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works. So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong? The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general. More. Ellerton writes an average good article on the scientific method but it has almost no relationship to why people doubt the human-caused global warming a-crock-a-lypse. Most doubters suspect that marketing doomsday is a means of raising taxes and Read More ›

Apparently, the US House is on an anti-science rampage. From himself at New Yorker: From climate change and evolution to sex education and vaccination, there has always been tension between scientists and Congress. But Smith, who has been in Congress since 1987 and assumed the chairmanship of the Science Committee in 2013, has escalated that tension into outright war. Smith has a background in American studies and law, not science. He has, however, received more than six hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions from the oil-and-gas industry during his time in Congress—more than from any other single industry. With a focus that is unprecedented, he’s now using his position to attack scientists and activists who work on climate change. Under his Read More ›

I have previously remarked on the “Goldilocks” mindset that seems to pervade climate change alarmism.  When it comes to climate we can be certain about one thing — it has been changing constantly for all of history.  Sometimes it has been much warmer than it is now, and sometimes it has been much colder.  Yet central to the climate alarmist narrative is the notion that there was some Goldilocks “just right” moment from which we are currently diverging and our job is to make it stop. Robert Tracinski comments on this phenomenon here:   The problem is that drought is normal in California. It’s normal on a year-to-year basis:Most years are dry, and the state has always relied on the Read More ›

From Climate Audit: n 2012, the then much ballyhoo-ed Australian temperature reconstruction of Gergis et al 2012 mysteriously disappeared from Journal of Climate after being criticized at Climate Audit. Now, more than four years later, a successor article has finally been published. Gergis says that the only problem with the original article was a “typo” in a single word. Rather than “taking the easy way out” and simply correcting the “typo”, Gergis instead embarked on a program that ultimately involved nine rounds of revision, 21 individual reviews, two editors and took longer than the American involvement in World War II. However, rather than Gergis et al 2016 being an improvement on or confirmation of Gergis et al 2012, it is Read More ›

From Economist: The two researchers therefore looked at samples of sea-floor sediment taken from a site on Blake Ridge in the north-western Atlantic Ocean. They knew from the work of others that some foram shells in this sediment have remained translucent while others have become opaque, permitting the two sorts from the same sedimentary layer to be compared and contrasted. The contrasts, they found, are huge. Radiocarbon dating suggests the opaque shells are a lot older than the translucent ones. In one sample, collected from a depth of 71-73cm below the sea floor, the translucent shells clocked in as being between 14,030 and 17,140 years old, while the opaque shells seemed to be aged between 26,120 and 32,580 years. Another Read More ›

From Eric Worrall at Watt’s Up with That?: The alleged weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation appears to be triggering a growing amount of speculation about abrupt cooling, like the plot of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. More. We’ll see. Good thing I didn’t put away my parka. Please. No more persecution of dissenters. See also: Scientific dissent can never be securities fraud Follow UD News at Twitter!

It’s unfalsifiable: So personal testimony will do. In a recent presentation to a bunch of political operatives, the Mann put his pseudo-scientific foot in his mouth. From the Washington Times: Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious. “Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change,” Mr. Mann told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee at a hearing. “What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years Read More ›

Robert Tracinski tells us why the greenies will never admit that they were dead wrong (pun intended) about DDT, even though their mistakes have led to the death of millions: So why not just admit that the hysteria whipped up over DDT was wrong? Because this was the founding issue of the environmentalist movement. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was the first book to convince the common man that “chemicals” are scary and that modern industry and technology were going to destroy us. Banning DDT was the first triumph of the environmentalist movement in using political pressure to override scientific skepticism and impose its agenda by force. http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/27/yes-you-can-blame-the-ddt-ban-for-zika/  

The global warming hype, unlike the nutrition freakout or the far side of Darwinism, could actually be true. But the behaviour of the proponents tells against that. From Willie Soon and István Markó at : Increasingly, we are seeing more and more outrageous and aggressive anti-scientific claims that anyone who is not willing to embrace the dangerous global warming bandwagon and to condemn its culprit, CO2, is actually the equivalent of a Holocaust Denier. This sort of name-calling, loud self-promotion and fact twisting actions, closer to political rodeo than to healthy scientific debates, are simply telling us that our opponents have already lost their fallacious arguments and are getting short on any real scientific facts. Professor Albert Einstein had it Read More ›

This time they are burning books in Portland. Read the last paragraph of this resolution adopted by the Portland School Board. Because the suppression of doubt or skepticism is the foundation of any good science education.  Right? As Robert Tracinski reports: Actually, the story is even worse than what conservative news sites have reported. It’s not just that Portland banished from its schools any active denial of catastrophic, man-made global warming; it’s that they banished any language that implies the smallest amount of doubt. Bill Bigelow, a former teacher now working for the activist group that pushed this resolution, explained its rationale in testimony to the school board: “Bigelow said PPS’ science textbooks are littered with words like ‘might,’ ‘may,’ and ‘could’ Read More ›

See here. Bill Nye fashions himself a voice of rational thought and scientific inquiry. His shtick has gotten him into classrooms and on an endless loop of evangelizing TV appearances. Yet nearly every time he speaks these days, Nye diminishes genuine science by resorting to scaremonger-y nuggets of easily dismissible ideologically-motivated nonsense.

Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel has attacked former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for questioning the existence of a scientific consensus on global warming and for promoting a documentary called Climate Hustle, whose aim is to expose the myths about global warming. Climatologist Judith Curry has written a review of the film, which she found to be “pretty entertaining and even interesting, especially the narratives developed around silly alarmist statements made by scientists and politicians.” Dr. Curry vouched that “there were no goofy or incredible statements about the science” in the movie, but she went on to add: “The perspective in Climate Hustle is arguably a minority perspective, at least in terms of world governments and a select group of scientists.” Read More ›

From Paul Driessen at Townhall: I saw Climate Hustle April 14, at its U.S. premiere on Capitol Hill in Washington. The film is informative and entertaining, pointed and humorous. As meteorologist Anthony Watts says, it is wickedly effective in its using slapstick humor and the words and deeds of climate alarmists to make you laugh at them. It examines the science on both sides of the issue … presents often hilarious planetary Armageddon prophecies of Al Gore, Leonard Nimoy and other doomsayers … and lets 30 scientists and other experts expose the climate scares and scams, explain Real World climate science, and delve deeply into the politics and media hype that have surrounded this issue since it was first concocted Read More ›

Here’s a link to an article from American Thinker that details how, in Ohio, the Univ. of Cincinnati did a three year study on the effects of oil-well “fracking,” the results of which demonstrate no contamination of ground water had occurred because of “fracking.” And then the study was quashed. Read More ›

Following on: Bill Nye open to jail time for climate change skeptics, from The Federalist: But Nye isn’t just speculating about putting people in jail. He is referring to a specific attempt to use the model of those old tobacco lawsuits to prosecute any company that has ever funded research or advocacy skeptical of claims about global warming. This campaign was started last year and has taken its newest steps recently with a meeting of state attorneys general who vowed to launch “investigations into whether fossil fuel companies misled investors and the public on the impact of climate change.” The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands—whom you would think would have enough to deal with at home straightening out Read More ›