Category Archives: Science (real)

We Only Have 500 Days Left, Part III

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Want to know why I distrust our liberal friends?

They drive how science goes wrong.

I started this three-part series with the simple question, “If you distrust what the Administration told you about the military, why do you trust what they say about global warming?”

Yes, I chose two hot button issues across the political spectrum. It’s always more interesting than yattering in a corner about National Safe Digging Month versus potholes

Sheeple Image Found at alt-market.comThe responses follow a predictable pattern:

“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the latest IPCC AR say it is so.”
“in Europe, where environmental awareness is far higher, everyone takes human caused global warming seriously.”
“There is 97% agreement on human caused global warming.”
“Man-Made Climate Change Deniers are the authentic environmental wackos.”
“BS, Dick.”

Trust but Verify
That “simple idea underpins science” but Ronald Reagan gave it a bad name among our Liberal friends who say “the science is settled.”

“Trust but do not verify” follows every “complete agreement,” the Liberal signal that people have not thought through their pet issue, are mistaken about their pet issue, don’t want to hear contradictions about their pet issue, and go ballistic if I ask them to rethink it.

See the summary of responses above.

Let’s look at the 97% agreement on human caused global warming and the IPCC.

John Cook published a paper in Skeptical Science that claims he and others reviewed nearly 12,000 abstracts of studies published in the peer-reviewed climate literature. They found that “97 percent of the papers” that expressed a position on anthropogenic global warming “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”

Our liberal friends latched onto that one, you betcha.

Unfortunately, Mr. Cook, um, cooked the books.

It turns out he was not alone.

The Economist reports that “modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying — to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity” — and they are doing it in fields from biotechnology and rust to, yes, “global warming.”

  • “Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis.”
  • “Researchers at … Amgen found they could reproduce just six of 53 ‘landmark’ studies in cancer research.”
  • “‘Negative results’ now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990.”

Papers from PNAS and IPCC fill most of the categories the Economist lists. Unfortunately, I do not expect my Liberal friends to accept the Economist [La la la la la la la la la la la] as a source, though. After all the Economist said of Liberal darling Paul Krugman, “the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship.”

And finally, for those who pray at the institutionalized ignorance altar to Al Gore, there may be a scientific consensus on global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans have created global warming, although I suspect 100 percent of them believe humans have created the crisis itself. Of course, this finding was in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies, so it must be suspect, yes?

There is good news: The Economist also reports, “The most enlightened journals are already becoming less averse to humdrum papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication.” [Emphasis added]

That small trend is a good start, but I don’t see it taking hold anywhere in the human-caused global warming industry and I don’t see it taking hold in the media or populace that supports and pays for said human-caused global warming industry.

 

Kerfuffle

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“We Only Have 500 Days Left to Avoid Climate Chaos!”

Cool!

I started a kerfuffle without really trying when I posted a random quip on Facebook.

If you distrust what the Administration told you about the military, why do you trust what they say about global warming?

There’s nothing particularly profound about tossing out a query that rotated into my email signature file. On the other hand, it does ask a profound question.

You can read the more than 100 comments here but I’ll summarize the discussion:

“Because they said so!”
“Oh no they didn’t and besides, they’re wrong!”
“Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

That’s the usual take on social media these days when a person who studied materials science, a cartoonist, an international banker, a retired chemist, and a couple of writers set themselves up as the experts on climate science. Or any other hot button issue.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
–Mark Twain

The solar deniers in this argument are quick to blame “the Internet” or “Faux News” or the “Koch Brothers” for any data that contradicts them. The irony that their proofs come from “the Internet” or “MSNBC” or “Tom Steyer” or the totally political IPCC aggregation committee apparently eludes them.

Once upon a time, I thought that nothing rivaled the misinformation spewed by global warming true believers and spinmeisters. Then I reported on the anti-GMO campaign. The way the Far Green consortium has distorted science makes Dr. Murari Lal look pure.

“We thought that if we can highlight [the fake ice melt data], it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action,” Dr. Lal told the Daily Mail.

In both cases, the purpose is to convince you, Dear Reader, to take up arms in the cause.

In both cases, the purpose is to keep the Green flowing. The green research dollars. The green investment dollars. The green tax dollars.

Science is not a Harris poll. It doesn’t matter a whit whether you believe in cold fusion or phrenology or that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. It doesn’t matter if 71% or 51% or 0% of all mankind believe in global warming. 100% of scientists believed Aristotle who told them a heavy body falls to earth faster than a light one. One man didn’t. The Church later found him “vehemently suspect of heresy” for saying the sun didn’t rotate around the earth. He spent the last years of his life under house arrest.

The trouble with our liberal friends
is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just
that they know so much that isn’t so.
And they would force us to go along.
–Dick Harper paraphrasing Ronald Reagan paraphrasing Mark Twain

Want to to know why I distrust our liberal friends?

Because they deride faith but put their faith in all the fads their polls tell them to believe. Because they adhere to vaccination denials but don’t accept the things Galileo (and others) showed them data to support.

And because everyone jumped to defend their faith in the “settled science” in this thread but not one of them answered the original question.

 

A Message of Faith

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Yesterday was Easter Sunday. Tomorrow is Earth Day. In between, we can find a message of faith.

“God has the last word,” Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, reminded television viewers yesterday.

One of those last words has long been, Don’t poop where you perch.

I saw Hurricane Hazel annihilate a larch tree in my front yard. I saw the 1998 ice storm decimate the forests around North Puffin. I watched Hurricane Wilma drown my South Puffin neighbors and Irene flood and sink and forever change the southern half of Vermont.

That was a more than a little bit of rain.

I’ve watched pilots shoot flares of silver iodide and dry ice, and liquid propane, and even table salt into a cloud in a vain hope of making it give up just a little bit of rain.

Rainmaking attempts go way back. A typical Tübatulabal shaman’s rain making bundle contains the all important quartz crystals plus charm stones, biface fragments of obsidian, a fossil fish vertebra, pebbles, some stibnite, milky quartz, and steatite, a small tobacco bag, a piece of rawhide, some plant material tied with a bit of denim, some soil and a denim sack. Oddly, the great southwestern American desert is still a desert in spite of those best efforts to make rain.

I’d say nature has the other last word over man.

Lily -- the Flower of Easter(from the Moon) Earth -- the Flower of ScienceToday, rain isn’t (quite) the issue. Temperature is. Over the millennia, the climate has and does change as solar activity varies, the magnetic poles shift, the moon wobbles, and Earth’s axis tilts a few degrees one way or the other. Right now, the planet is cooling (slightly) from what the alarmists said was the all time high but it had been rising precipitously. Despite the alarmists, it hasn’t gotten as warm as during Roman and Medieval times, but it is warmer than 100 years ago.

There are two schools of thought about what drives global warming. On the one side are a small but growing number of scientists who have found wider swings in the fossil record before homo sapiens walked upright. They’re looking at drivers like the sun now. On the other side are a large number of scientists who believe man and only man has driven every variation in planetary temperatures. They’ve stopped looking for the drivers.

The U.N.-operated sanctioning body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says it is too late. They arrived at this conclusion not by making startling new discoveries but by tweaking the data they already have.

But wait! We can fix it if we just give up meat and cars and our iPhones!

Those who pray at the altar of Al Gore have faith that man has the last word over nature.

Humans
Unaware of
Basic
Real
Icky
Science

The solar deniers who pray at the altar of Al Gore tell us that “the science is fixed” but all we have to do is return to the Stone Age and the planet may get back to normal. After all, those biface fragments of obsidian (“stone knives” to the rest of us) brought a lot of rain to the desert, they did.

I have great faith in two certainties: good science and man’s hubris.

Tomorrow is Earth Day. I have great hope that good science will triumph over great hubris in the long run. Day-to-day? I’m not so sure.

 

Norman Who?

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Today would have been Norman Borlaug’s 100th birthday.

wheatAmerican Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, Ph.D., was a plant pathologist and geneticist. He is often called “the father of the Green Revolution.” Dr. Borlaug’s work doubled wheat yields in Mexico and India and Pakistan which has saved over a billion people from starvation.

Genetically Modified Organisms.

Here in the United States, the Far Green (slogan: “Just Say No to G-M-O”) has made that a dirty word.

I guess those billion people are just an inconvenient truth.

Rehash

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Year end usually means a wrap-up but I really dislike retreading the same roads and rehashing old news. Still, I can maybe get one person to think outside the box.

The trouble with our liberal friends
is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just
that they know so much that isn’t so.
–Ronald Reagan

University of Vermont professor Henry Perkins’ eugenics courses and his “Vermont Eugenics Survey” — well supported by his own empirical evidence — led directly to the Vermont sterilization law of 1931. Vermont’s 253 sterilizations on poor, rural folks as well as Abenaki Indians, French-Canadians and others put that state only half way up the scale of eugenics providers nationwide. Millions of true believers had blind faith in eugenics.

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month reported that “lobotomy’s most dogged salesman,” the late Dr. Walter Freeman, performed some 3,500 frontal lobotomies during the 1940s and 1950s including Rosemary Kennedy’s at the age of 23. He was so confident that he once demonstrated his procedure by hammering an icepick into each eye socket of a patient and “toggling” the picks around certain that he was severing the brain tissue “correctly.” Millions of true believers had blind faith in the science of lobotomies.

Astrology has shown through extensive experimentation that the positions of celestial bodies influences, divines, or predicts personality, human activities, and other terrestrial matters. Millions of true believers still have blind faith in the science of Astrology.

Three stories from Facebook this week illustrate my point about blind faith.

“OMG,” my friend Ashley Proctor wrote. “We all must come to the realization that eating anything out of the Pacific Ocean (let alone swimming in it) is a thing in the past.”

She was responding to the headline, All Bluefin Tuna Caught In California Are Radioactive.

“It’s never going away,” she wrote. “Not in our lifetime. Not ever. WE SCREWED UP THE PACIFIC OCEAN, people. We screwed up the OCEAN.”

~~~

I basked (briefly to be sure) when one of my teaching moments appeared to bear fruit: Dr. Jon Friar, my earnest, apparently data driven liberal friend wrote in a Global Warming thread, “This blind race toward ignorance is especially galling when it’s run by people like Dick, who really should know better.” Unfortunately, that and the hope “that reason and facts will convince and even convert, when in fact they don’t do either” have been my own arguments about Dr. Friar and his friends for some years now.

“A more likely truth is that they’re simply feeding your words back to you as a (pretty decent) troll,” Liz Arden said.

~~~

“Climate scientists got their funding from the NSF and NASA,” Dr. Friar said. “You can’t get better data than that.”

~~~

“Congratulations, Dick!” my friend Lee Bruhl wrote in response to Delay Is Not Working. “You have joined a few million other Americans in signing up for more extensive medical insurance than you had before and you did it through Healthcare.gov!”

Our liberal friends obviously take only what confirms their prejudices out of any report.

Delay Is Not Working as well as the bulk of data-driven reports (including mine) about health care reform show that it is neither reformed nor viable. It does pointedly mention that I was never able to make Healthcare.gov work and that I “signed up” via three long phone calls.

Here’s the bulletin: A few million Americans have indeed signed up for new policies under the mandate of Obamacare. Most are the people like me whose policies the ACA forced insurers to cancel. And it appears that fewer Americans will be insured as of January 1 than are insured today. Still, millions of true believers have blind faith in Obamacare.

The liberal argument for Anthropogenic Global Warming goes something like this: “Man causes it so we have to uncause it. I know this because noted scientists like Al Gore told me so.”

That same liberal argument trots out a bunch of data that shows global temps have risen and some computer predictions say that our continued existence will drive its continued rise. “The science is fixed,” they say in contradiction to the actual scientific method. In fact, when other scientists offer data like solar activity that disputes their flat-earth belief, our liberal friends put their thumbs in their ears.

Here’s the bulletin: the Earth heats and the Earth cools. Since we have both limited resources and limited political will, it would be a whole lot smarter to devote those scarce resources to adapting to the changes than to marketing a costly political measure built on junk science. Still, millions of true believers have blind faith in Global Warming and the idea that we can fix it just by eliminating man’s influence.

The liberal argument for research funding goes something like this: “If the government says so, it must be impartial.” Interestingly, many of the scientists studying or performing phrenology, eugenics, lobotomies, and tobacco did so with government funding.

Here’s the bulletin (this is an analogy): Bernie Sanders likes us to believe the PAC campaign funds he raises from unions and American Crystal Sugar are somehow less corrupting than PAC campaign funds his opponents get from ExxonMobil. Still, millions of true believers have blind faith in scientists on the government payroll. As long as those moneys are for a “good” cause.

The radioactive liberal argument starts from a report that “every bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has shown to be contaminated with radiation that originated in Fukushima. Every single one.”

Never mind that most reports show the Fukushima radiation in Pacific tuna is equal to about one twentieth of a banana (the Forbes article is most readable). Doesn’t matter. Millions of true believers have blind faith that “We screwed up the OCEAN.”

Here’s the bulletin: OMG! WE SCREWED UP BANANAs people! We screwed up BANANAS. I’ll never eat fruit again!

One last try.

The scientific method is the technique true scientists use to investigate phenomena, acquire new knowledge, and (this is key) correct previous theories. Scientists systematically observe, measure, experiment, and test, their hypotheses. Most importantly, scientists support a theory as long as they can confirm its predictions but they challenge a theory when even one experiment or bit of data proves its predictions false.

The political scientists of the liberal left have shown that they find a theory like radioactive tuna, find some data like periodically rising temperatures that supports the theory, and declare the theory fact as they do with the “success” of the ACA in reducing the cost of health care. Then they drink the Kool-Aid.

I’ll never eat fruit again!

Happy New Year.