The Revolution Will Be Televised
Grab a beverage.
Tom Luongo- The Great Reset is Dead, Long Live the Great Reset
Spoken like the true authoritarian that he is, Harari can only see violence and chaos. He’s not wrong. The violence and chaos coming, however, have their roots in his attempts (or complicity) in trying to force, through violence, a global order on humanity which humanity doesn’t want.
This push towards violence, however, can stop tomorrow. All that has to happen is for cretins like Harari, Soros, Schwab, Gates, and all the people behind them, to truly accept the fact that they have failed and cut a deal with us.
Opinions Verboten
National Post- Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1 million in defamation lawsuit
During the trial, Steyn represented himself, but said through his manager Melissa Howes that he would be appealing the $1 million award in punitive damages, saying it would have to face “due process scrutiny.”
“We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue,” Steyn said on Thursday through his manager. “And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages.”
Pick Up The Cookie?
The Sound Of Settled Science
“We believe that it is crucial to thoroughly revise our preconceptions of the Amazonian world.”
Man Bites Mann
Mark is in Washington resting up in preparation for the resumption of his trial at the DC Superior Court on Monday morning.
In the meantime, here are Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer with their dramatised reconstruction of the last day’s events, including what Powerline’s John Hinderaker described as Steyn’s “bravura performance” of his opening statement.
I’m Going To Miss The Arctic Sea Ice
Daily Sceptic- Arctic Sea Ice Soars to Highest Level for 21 Years
The dramatic, if largely unpublicised, recovery in Arctic sea ice is continuing into the New Year. Despite the contestable claims of the ‘hottest year ever’ (and even hotter in 2024), Arctic sea ice on January 8th stood at its highest level in 21 years. Last December, the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) revealed that sea ice recorded its third highest monthly gain in the modern 45-year record.
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Maldives
If sea level rise is ongoing and inexorable, then all else equal, the areal extent of global land areas should be shrinking, especially in low-lying continental areas and among tropical islands. Indeed that is the message that NASA is telling children, warning of the disappearance of large parts of the coastline, as shown below, with large parts of Florida and Louisiana succumbing to the seas.
Sea levels around the world of course are rising and expected to continue to rise throughout the 21st century and beyond. However, from 1985 to 2015 — a period when global sea levels increased by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) — the areal extent of global coastal land increased by almost 34,000 square kilometers (about 13k square miles), or about the size of Belgium home to more than 11 million people.
If the notion of landification seems paradoxical or contrary to what you’ve read in the media, don’t worry, you won’t be not alone.
The Sound Of Settled Science
For the first time, researchers have analyzed the impact of antibiotic use on the rise of treatment-resistant bacteria over the last 20 years in the UK and Norway. They show that while the increase in drug use has amplified the spread of superbugs, it is not the only driver. […]
By analyzing data that spanned almost 20 years, they found that the use of antibiotics was linked to increased resistance in some instances, depending on the type of antibiotic. One class of antibiotics, non-penicillin beta-lactams, was used three to five times more on average per person in the UK compared to Norway. This has led to a higher incidence of infections by a certain multi-drug resistant E. coli strain.
However, the UK also uses the antibiotic trimethoprim more often, but analysis did not uncover higher levels of resistance in the UK when comparing the common E. coli strains found in both countries.
The study found that the survival of MDR bacteria depended on what strains of E. coli were in the surrounding environment. Due to this and other selective pressures in an area, researchers concluded that it is not possible to assume that the widespread use of one type of antibiotic will have the same effect on antibiotic-resistant bacteria spread in different countries.
The Thrill Of Word-Policing
Apparently, the word collision is, for Dr Madrid, much too brutal and masculine when referring to the convergence of two galaxies, and the subsequent merging of the supermassive black holes at their centres – an event that will entail the sling-shotting of countless stars and their orbiting planets, and which may release energy equivalent to around 100 million supernova explosions, and to subsequently be detectable halfway across the universe.
Come, let’s pay a visit to the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American.
Starving Cancer
Cedars Sinai- Researchers Look to Fasting as a Next Step in Cancer Treatment
…fasting selectively targets cancer cells based on their vulnerabilities—just like chemotherapy. While healthy cells lie dormant during a fast (and shore up their defenses), cancer cells are already damaged, so they struggle to survive without nourishment.
“I liken it to bears and hummingbirds,” Freedland explained. “In the absence of food, bears hibernate. But hummingbirds, like tumor cells, can’t hibernate—and they’ll die without food.”
“the world did not start when your dataset begins …”
Sensible advice for no matter what side of a policy debate you’re on: Against Mathiness, Part 2
Policy research is more useful and relevant when it focuses on real-world variables. It is very easy for us researchers to study proxies for real-world variables or dimensionless indices in search of statistical or scientific significance. However, translating the practical meaning of those variables back to the real-world may not be particularly straightforward or even possible. .
Consider how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confused itself over a study of measurements of hurricanes, mistakenly converting trends in measurements of hurricanes to making claims about trends in hurricanes (which I documented here and here). The urge to use proxies for the thing-we-really-want-to-say-something-about often arises because the real-world variable does not give the results we want or expect. If you want to study hurricanes, study hurricanes. If hurricanes don’t give the results you want, that says something important — say it and don’t go looking for work-arounds.
For those who missed it, Part One.
Poop Patrol
Lets have a look.
“… an official from NASA called me up”
“Mathiness” is a term coined by economist Paul Romer, who characterized it as a style that “lets academic politics masquerade as science.” […]
Mathiness is the academic’s truthiness. Math makes research seem serious and science-like. For many consumers of research, math creates a barrier of technical sophistication that prevents the evaluation of truth-claims. When that happens, mathiness provides an aura of authority that says, “trust us, not them.”
In my UCLA talk, I opened by sharing that more than thirty years ago NASA called me up and asked me to retract my Master’s thesis, which was a comprehensive policy evaluation of the Space Shuttle program.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Over the past few weeks I have read Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, by Mike Davis. During my time as a scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I spent a lot of time researching impacts of and responses to El Niño and La Niña under the guidance of the one and only Mickey Glantz. I was aware of the 1877-78 El Niño event and its profound impacts, but I never connected its significance to the contemporary climate discourse until recently.
Davis compiles estimates suggesting that more than 50 million people died in the mid-1870s related to extreme weather and climate — That equates to about 4% of global population. Today, that same proportion of the world’s population would be over 320 million deaths, or almost the entire population of the entire United States. We cannot even imagine this magnitude of human suffering.
The proximate cause of the 1870s massive climate impacts was a very strong El Niño even in 1877 and 1878, but that event was also perhaps comparable to strong El Niño events in 1997/98 and 2015/16. What accounts for the massive loss of life in the 1870s? Davis explores this in depth, and the simple answer is colonial rule informed by Malthusian impulses.
The Sound Of Settled Science
10 minute on the heretics of today.
Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blindingly Obvious
Your morning science: Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity
Dr John Armstrong, King’s, Dr Alice Sullivan, University College London and George M Perry, an independent researcher from the USA, conducted a study analysing data on the performance of people who competed in the non-binary category of 21 races in the New York Road Runners database.
Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes. The data set of 166 race times achieved by non-binary athletes within a data set of 85,173 race times was selected as it was the largest available consistently formatted data on non-binary athletes.
Since the race results do not provide the sex of non-binary athletes, the sex of non-binary athletes was either derived from previous races they had run, or where this wasn’t available, the researchers used a novel technique to model the sex of athletes probabilistically based on their given names, using US Social Security Administration data. Race times were used as the outcome variable in linear models with explanatory variables derived from biological sex, gender identity, age and the event being raced.
I don’t ever want to hear another word about the flat-earth people. Not. One. Word.
Y2Kyoto: Follow The Science
Into the void;
A new study by a team of mostly San Francisco Bay Area scientists that found human-caused climate warming has increased the frequency of extremely fast-spreading California wildfires has come into question from the unlikeliest of critics—its own lead author.
Patrick T. Brown, climate team co-director at the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley and a visiting research professor at San Jose State University, said his Aug. 30 paper in the prestigious British journal Nature is scientifically sound and “advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior.”
But Brown this week dropped a bomb on the journal—as well as his study’s co-authors who are staunchly defending the team’s work. In an online article, blog post and social media posts, Brown said he “left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” causing almost as much of a stir as the alarming findings themselves.
Brown wrote that the study didn’t look at poor forest management and other factors that are just as, if not more, important to fire behavior because “I knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.” He added such bias in climate science “misinforms the public” and “makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Thousands of years before ancient people in Central Eurasia learned to farm, hunter-gatherer groups in the subarctic were building some of the first permanent, fortified settlements, challenging the notion that agriculture was a prerequisite for societies to ‘settle down’.
Researchers now think they have dated the earliest known fortifications in the icy north, if not the world, near a curve of the Amnya River in Western Siberia. […]
Traditionally, archaeologists have assumed that foraging communities were not yet societally or politically ‘complex’ enough to build monumental, permanent structures that needed to be maintained or defended.
Yet ongoing research at the Amnya promontory and other archaeological sites around the world suggest that cultivating crops and rearing animals aren’t the only incentives for such activity.
Paper here.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
From the archives of the Space Studies Institute: The Mass Driver (h/t)