“More research is needed,” say all the people who make money from such pointless research.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Phys Org: UNC School of Medicine researchers discovered a gene called R2d2 – Responder to meiotic drive 2 – that breaks Gregor Mendel’s century-old “law of segregation,” which states that you have an equal probability of inheriting each of two copies of every gene from both parents.
Y2Kyoto: Planetary Fever Update
From the Not Climate, Just Weather Network.
YNoKyoto
Study shows: skeptics know more about climate science than believers
The Sound Of Settled Science
Say, about that cholesterol – “a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.”
h/t Kevin B.
The Sound Of Settled Science
The new peer-reviewed paper, authored by a team of prominent researchers led by Dr. Corrine Keet of John’s Hopkins Children’s Center, studied over 23,000 U.S. children and found no statistically significant difference in asthma rates between those who live in inner-city neighborhoods (and are thus subject to higher pollution levels) and those who do not (once controlling for other factors). Instead, researchers concluded that poverty was a greater predictor for higher asthma rates than outdoor air pollution.
The study still points to air pollution as a cause for asthma, only it’s indoor air pollution–think second hand smoke, rodents, mold, etc.–that may be the main culprit.
It’s a radical finding. The study upends more than half a century of research that assumed outdoor air pollution in cities was to blame for higher asthma rates–a hypothesis repeatedly used by EPA regulators to justify the agency’s regulations.
The study couldn’t come at a worse time for the agency. EPA is preparing to tighten national standards for ground-level ozone (the main ingredient in smog) by as much as 20 percent. To justify the move, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy argued she was “following science” to “protect those most at-risk–our children, our elderly, and people already suffering from lung diseases like asthma.”
Restoring Science To Its Rightful Place
Anti-science left wing culture…
… from hippies to Whole Foods shoppers, is enamored of health-care pseudoscience — despite an overwhelming lack of scientific evidence for its effectiveness. Given that “with acupuncture the outcome does not depend on needle location or even needle insertion,” wrote David Colquhoun and Steven Novella in 2013 in Anesthesia and Analgesia, the journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society, “the only sensible conclusion is that acupuncture does not work.” They note that by 1822 Chinese emperor Dao Guang had forbidden the practice from the Imperial Medical Academy; it was revived under Mao Zedong in the 1960s to promote Chinese nationalism, and to compensate for the scarcity of trained doctors in the country — hardly evidence for its healing properties. But a practitioner is available on nearly every Bay Area block.
It’s not entirely their fault.
Restoring Science To Its Rightful Place
I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, “No, really, I’m not joking.” It’s those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people.
More here: The communities where anti-vaxxers cluster are also among the most liberal.
It’s like there’s a pattern.
Lots more in this vein at Instapundit.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Science: Constrained work output of the moist atmospheric heat engine in a warming climate
Incoming and outgoing solar radiation couple with heat exchange at Earth’s surface to drive weather patterns that redistribute heat and moisture around the globe, creating an atmospheric heat engine. Here, we investigate the engine’s work output using thermodynamic diagrams computed from reanalyzed observations and from a climate model simulation with anthropogenic forcing. We show that the work output is always less than that of an equivalent Carnot cycle and that it is constrained by the power necessary to maintain the hydrological cycle. In the climate simulation, the hydrological cycle increases more rapidly than the equivalent Carnot cycle. We conclude that the intensification of the hydrological cycle in warmer climates might limit the heat engine’s ability to generate work.
I’ll let the engineers race to explain in the comments.
Update. Or try this.
Y2Kyoto: Revisionist Temperature
Suppose say, that for the last 100 years my family have been maintaining a weather station at the bottom of our garden, diligently recording the temperatures day by day, and that what these records show is this: that in the 1930s it was jolly hot – even hotter than in the 1980s; that since the 1940s it has been cooling.
What conclusions would you draw from this hard evidence?
Well the obvious one, I imagine, is that the dramatic Twentieth Century warming that people like Al Gore have been banging on about is a crock. At least according to this particular weather station it is.
Now how would you feel if you went and took these temperature records along to one of the world’s leading global warming experts – say Gavin Schmidt at NASA or Phil Jones at CRU or Michael Mann at Penn State – and they studied your records for a moment and said: “This isn’t right.” What if they then crossed out all your temperature measurements, did a few calculations on the back of an envelope, and scribbled in their amendments? And you studied those adjustments and you realised, to your astonishment, that the new, pretend temperature measurements told an entirely different story from the original, real temperature measurements: that where before your records showed a cooling since the 1940s they now showed a warming trend.
What Would We Do Without Researchers?
Science rediscovers the Viking.
“Is That A Fat Wad Of Research $$$ In Your Pocket?”
Y2Kyoto: Planetary Fever Update
The National Weather Service (NWS) in New York City is calling the potential for epic snowfall “historic,” while the Boston office says the incoming storm is a “textbook case for a major winter storm/blizzard.” Three-day snow totals could reach 24-36 inches in each city–good enough to rival the biggest Northeast snowstorms on record.
[…]
What’s making this particular storm so potent? In sharp contrast to last week’s nor’easter, there’s no shortage of cold air this time around. A blocking high-pressure system to the north will slow the storm’s advance to a crawl–with the center spending up to 24 hours just off Long Island–right as it is peaking in strength. Combine that with a roaring, perfectly kinked jet stream, and you have all the ingredients for an explosive storm that will reach “bomb” criteria, funneling Arctic air southwards and converting it into a thick blanket of wind-whipped white. All the extra cold air may also boost snow totals, because “drier,” colder snow is up to 50 percent fluffier than “wet” snow that falls with temperatures nearer the freezing point.
Andromeda
The Sound Of Settled Science
Peer-reviewed pocket-calculator climate model exposes serious errors in complex computer models;
The paper, Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model, by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon, David Legates and Matt Briggs, survived three rounds of tough peer review in which two of the reviewers had at first opposed the paper on the ground that it questioned the IPCC’s predictions.
When the paper’s four authors first tested the finished model’s global-warming predictions against those of the complex computer models and against observed real-world temperature change, their simple model was closer to the measured rate of global warming than all the projections of the complex “general-circulation” models…
The link provided for download is broken, you can find it here instead. Click “pdf”.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Short version-some people who were (mostly) not scientists and certainly don’t know how to do research properly conducted a series of studies that had foregone conclusions supporting their position on climate policy. For Prall, Cook and Lewandowsky the foregone nature of the conclusions was explicit-they wrote on various websites that they were conducting the studies with a predetermined end. For Oreskes it was implicit, but easy to see, as she structured her research carefully, not to show the breadth of opinion on climate change, but rather to conceal it.
h/t Don B.
The Sound Of Settled Science
“Artificial Amplification of Warming Trends Across the Mountains of the Western United States”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Protein deniers defy consensus;
Open any introductory biology textbook and one of the first things you’ll learn is that our DNA spells out the instructions for making proteins, tiny machines that do much of the work in our body’s cells. Results from a study published on Jan. 2 in Science defy textbook science, showing for the first time that the building blocks of a protein, called amino acids, can be assembled without blueprints — DNA and an intermediate template called messenger RNA (mRNA). A team of researchers has observed a case in which another protein specifies which amino acids are added.
“This surprising discovery reflects how incomplete our understanding of biology is,” says first author Peter Shen, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at the University of Utah. “Nature is capable of more than we realize.”
“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Newly released research, primarily from NASA and the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, indicates that melting of selective Greenland Glaciers is related to geologically induced heat flow, and not manmade atmospheric global warming.