'Climate Science' Jumps the Shark

It's fascinating when a premature scientific orthodoxy, like "global climate change science", or whatever they are calling it these days, starts becoming patriarchal.

Like, when they start burning books that disagree with them. More references can be found here and here and here and here and here.

Apparently, the profs, San Jose State University Meteorology Department chair Alison Bridger, PhD, and associate professor Craig Clements, PhD, thought it was hilarious to burn a book they disagreed with, a process that explicitly adds carbon dioxide to the air. The book, by the way, is “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania” by Steve Gorham, which is reportedly a lively read that doesn't take itself as seriously as these two professors.

Either SJSU or the Meterology department realized the mistake after the picture went viral, and attempted to scrub it off their website, but Climate scientists, just like real scientists, should know that the Internet is forever.

Interestingly enough, they seem to have succeeded in deleting it from the left half the Web, though. I was unable to find reference to it on any major liberal sites. Apparently book burning and climate science are subjects that their readers aren't interested in?

Nature Admits the Holes...

An interesting pair of articles in Nature.

To me, there are some basic things that any scientist has to do to maintain trust in his conclusions.

Tell the truth.

Do not alter the data.

When you alter the data or "splice together" different data to make your data match the conclusions, mark the change prominently. Doing otherwise is known as "fraud".

Do not disparage or attempt to marginalize scientists who do not agree with your conclusions.

Do not mischaracterize the views of scientist who do not agree with your conclusions. Like, for instance, calling them a

small coterie of individuals who deny humanity's influence on climate.

Do not attempt to prevent the publication of studies that disagree with you. If their study is wrong, scientists will demonstrate what mistakes were made and how. If their study is right, then preventing its publication is a crime against science, and probably a legal tort as well. Either way, the publication of varying viewpoints leads to advancement of truth and science.

Be honest about your conflicts of interest. Getting paid for being alarmist is just as seedy as getting paid for ignoring facts the other way.

When the data show you're wrong, admit it and shut up until you have thoroughly reevaluated your prior conclusions. And when you come back, have a different message.

When you are discussing science, leave out such irrelevant data such as your opinion about how some scientists may "feel" about having to do good science.

McIntyre has doggedly attacked the proxy records, particularly the statistics used to analyse tree-ring data.
Many scientists are tired of the criticisms [emphasis mine], and the IPCC concluded that it is "likely" that the second half of the twentieth century was the warmest 50-year period in the Northern Hemisphere during the past 1,300 years. But legitimate questions remain about paleoclimate proxies, according to the IPCC.

I'm sure the intelligentsia and the Catholic Church in the 1600s were tired of criticisms of their terracentric world-view. That says nothing about the relative merits of the Copernican system, vis-a-vis the Ptolemaic system.

A magazine called "Nature" can be presumed to have a biased viewpoint, and that's fine. Bias has its place. But science as a whole has to be the sum of all the ways of looking at things. True science is based upon parallax.

Biased censorship of a scientific viewpoint is just plain evil, probably illegal, and should lead to both civil and criminal penalties, especially if it forces honest scientists out of the field of climate research because they are afraid of being marginalized for speaking truth.


hat tip, James Taranto of Opinion Journal Online.

Global Climate Change - A Walk on the Beach

There's actually a fairly simple solution to "Global Warming", if it were occurring. Simple, and much less expensive than the proposed carbon tax-and-spend schemes or tax-and-graft-to-third-world-dictator schemes.

You see my solution every summer day on the beaches.

Mylar umbrellas.

Okay, so I'm not putting them on the beaches, I'm putting them up in space. The entire global warming problem, as of the worst estimates, is a few degrees Fahrenheit over a century. Let's say 4-5 so we get worst case scenario on the problem.

And yet, on any desert, the day-to-night temperature drop is huge - on the order of 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit. So that means that the sun is warming the earth by that much each day.

So, at worst, we need to cool the planet each century by 1/10 the amount of energy that the sun sends each day. What percentage is that?

EQ 1: 4/40 * 1/100 * 1/365 => 0.00027%

Okay, so that's the maximum percentage of incoming energy that we need to stop.

So how many square miles of energy are we getting, anyway? You remember pi times radius squared? Well, the radius of the earth is 4000 miles, so the area of sunlight that Earth intercepts is a circle with about 50 million square miles.

EQ 2: 3.15 * 4000 * 4000 = 50,265,482 square miles

Multiply that by our percent from Equation 1 and you get about 138 square miles of umbrella needed to solve the entire problem.

EQ 3: 50,265,482 * 0.00027% = 137.7136506

So, we can solve the whole alleged problem with current technology and a couple of hundred square miles of PVC and mylar. I make that out to be roughly three hundred shuttle loads, and even with NASA's current atrocious cost structure it's a tenth or less of the cost of the other proposed solutions.

The great thing about this particular solution is that, when the sun drops out of its current warming cycle and the coming ice age hits, we can reverse the mylar and reflect sunlight down to warm the Earth by a similar amount. Rough calculations tell me that we'll need about three times this many satellites at that time, and all the carbon dioxide we can put out.

Science Magazine and Academic Fraud

It's fairly often that we hear complaints about "politicizing science", generally from the left and generally talking about Bush's refusal to allow federal funding of one particular type of stem cell research that requires human fetuses to be created and destroyed, something that is found ethically troublesome by roughly half the population.

We don't hear the same question when it's about leftists ignoring science or making false claims (Hi Al!) in their attempts to change the world's economy away from use of carbon dioxide. (Which I believe is currently protecting us from the coming ice age.)

Apparently, Science Magazine doesn't feel it has to publish corrections when they publish false or shoddy research that makes exaggerated political claims about "consensus" on "global climate change". In fact, they appear to actively conceal their errors, and to intentionally time their shoddiness to bolster leftist political theatre (much like the Lancet).

A 2004 article printed in Science, but apparently never peer-reviewed, claimed that of the 928 peer-reviewed papers from 1993-2003 in the ISI database on "climate change", 75% of them agreed with her idea of consensus and the other 25% were silent. In other words, "science historian" Naomi Oreskes claimed there was no argument about human-caused global warming. She defined the consensus thus:

“Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Aside from the obvious and undenied point that humans put out gasses, pretty much all of her claims were wrong, from the number of studies of "climate change" to what those studies actually said regarding the points in her consensus statement above.

Dr. Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, conducted a search of the peer-reviewed studies in the ISI database, and found that there were over 12000 that matched the term she claimed she used. When the term was later adjusted in an errata statement to "global climate change", there were 929, which is fairly close to Oreskes's number above. However, only 13 explicitly agreed with her claim, and more than twice as many explicitly disputed it, even in the abstract.

The details were even more incriminating, recalling Michael A. Bellesiles's fraudulent anti-gun research. Science, of course, has refused to publish the corrections, or the later studies that show the radically different distribution of opinions on papers published after 2004.

You can read the whole story here.

Carbon Candor

A fascinating opinion article over on Wall Street Journal points out new testimony by NASA global warming alarmist James Hansen, where he tells Congress not to start jimmying around with the carbon credit system to pick winners and losers.

He says, in effect, if you're going to have a carbon tax, give the money to the people and tax the businesses evenly, and don't make it some kind of source of green blackmail money.

I'd agree to that, except I'd go one further. I'd say, give the credits to individual American citizens and let them sell, buy, keep or spend them. If Greenies want to drive up the cost by buying and retiring the credits, let them. That way, at least, the system is content-neutral, and whoever can reduce their carbon imprint can automatically make money by doing so. You will see companies moving as quickly as they can to add efficiency to their methods.

You'd also want to figure out how you were going to calculate the carbon released or sequestered by an activity, so that the whole system worked effectively.

Another caveat on that is that Congress needs to make sure that no employer can have anything to say about their employees' credits.