Category: Unsettled Science

The Sound Of Settled Science

Everything keeps getting older.

Archaeologists have new evidence suggesting that humans occupied Oregon more than 18,000 years ago. This makes it one of the oldest known sites of human occupation in North America.

A 2023 radiocarbon dating analysis was made based on findings at the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter near Burns, Oregon. The University of Oregon Archaeological Field School has been excavating at the site, which features a shallow overhang in an otherwise open environment. The field school has been working in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management since 2011.

Archaeologists have been studying how and when people migrated to the Americas for over a century. While researchers used to assume that no humans were on the continent until about 13,000 years ago — when they walked over the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age — both genetic and archaeological evidence have been pushing that date back further and further. However, these dates have spurred controversy.

The time has come to have a conversation on a name change. (link fixed)

What Would We Do Without Experts?

Experts and the Power of Self-Deception

Experts are ordinary human beings, with all the fallibilities that come with membership in our species. Like everyone else, experts sometimes suppress truth and disseminate falsehoods for self-preservation or personal gain. Sometimes, they do so in service to some larger cause. Experts, short on time or resources, may cut corners, publishing information they hope is correct, while knowing it may not be. In all these situations, the expert knows his or her information is or may be false.

More interesting, more likely, and more dangerous are those situations where the expert sincerely believes his or her falsehoods to be correct, owing to the lure of self-deception.

Another good essay by Robert F. Graboyes, who is generous with his free content. Pour a coffee and consider subscribing to his always excellent substack.

Y2Kyoto: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai

Thomas Lifson;

The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations. It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year-and-a-half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.

So, why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically? Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I – probably along with you — had never heard of. The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific. Don’t take it from me, take it from NASA …

h/t Robert L

What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

Roger Pielke Jr: A whistleblower shares shocking details of corruption of peer review in climate science

I have been contacted by a whistleblower with a remarkable story of corruption of the academic peer-review process involving a paper published in 2022. The whistleblower has provided me with relevant emails, reviews and internal deliberations from which I recount this disturbing episode — which ends with an unwarranted and politically-motivated retraction of a paper that some climate scientists happened to disagree with.

The paper at the center of this story is not particularly significant, as it mainly reviews the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on trends in weather extremes. The paper does venture a bit too far (in my view) into commentary, but that is neither unique nor a basis for retracting a paper – if it were we’d have a lot of retractions!

To be clear, there is absolutely no allegation of research fraud or misconduct here, just simple disagreement. Instead of countering arguments and evidence via the peer reviewed literature, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher – Springer Nature, perhaps the world’s most important scientific publisher – to retract a paper. Sadly, the pressure campaign worked.

The abuse of the peer review process documented here is remarkable and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicized as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open and behind the scenes.

The Sound Of Settled Science

The Nuclear Theory You Never Knew Was Nonsense

In 2018, I was asked to submit a paper and make a presentation on the fraud of LNT to a joint meeting of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) and the Health Physics Society (HPS) on low-level radiation hazards and risk management. I was asked because the organizers of the meeting knew that I was critical of LNT radiation biophysics — I thought it was a crock.

LNT says there is no safe level of radiation exposure, but obviously, the better rule is the rule of Paracelsus: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes that a thing is no poison.” (The dose makes the poison.) No threshold of LNT throws that maxim out the window.

My negative attitude about LNT was nurtured by a twenty-plus-year interest in the work of Ed Calabrese, U. Mass Amherst, reigning expert on low-level radiation hazards and the theory of heresies that asserts a tri-phasic effect of exposure of all kinds — 1) a no effect level, 2) a beneficial effect at low exposure levels, and 3) a toxic effect at higher levels of exposure. My medical experience with drug effects shows that same hermetic diphasic effect — drugs have a sweet spot between no effect and toxic effect.

h/t PG

In The Mail

Susan Crockford has a new book out.

Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise  published by Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford (paperback/ebook) explains everything about the origin of polar bears: not just when and where the species arose, but exactly how it happened! No other book like this exists. Despite decades of serving as an icon for the catastrophic climate change narrative, the polar bear has never had its evolutionary history explained so completely, never mind in a fully-referenced, plain-language style. This comprehensive look at polar bear evolution provides critical insight into why we should expect Ursus maritimus to survive, even if the climate gets warmer than it is now.

Check it out.

The Sound Of Settled Science

The Illusion of Consensus

The project of science calls for rigor, humility, and open discussion. The pandemic has revealed the stunning magnitude of the political and institutional capture of science. For this reason, both of us — Rav and Jay — are launching a podcast devoted to investigating the concoction of pseudo-consensus in science and its ramifications for our society. To start — and for quite some time — they will be examining the illusory consensus during COVID. However they will soon branch out into issues pertaining to transgender care, mental health, psychiatry, and nutrition — topics that have been wholly corrupted with one monolithic consensus that has proven to bear many costs on our society.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Dispatches from the war on meat;

In a new, unprecedented effort, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, formulating a new rating system to communicate health risks in the process. Their findings mostly dispel any concerns about eating red meat.

“We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke,” they summarized.

The IHME scientists had been observing the shoddy nature of health science for decades. Each year, hundreds of frankly lazy studies are published that simply attempt to find an observational link between some action — eating a food for example — and a health outcome, like death or disease. In the end, owing to sloppy methods, varying subject populations, and inconsistent statistical measures, everything, especially different foods, seems to be both associated and not associated with cancer. How is the lay public supposed to interpret this mess?

The Sound Of Settled Science

Via Phantom Soapbox: Speed of light violated, spooky action at a distance confirmed

Albert Einstein was famously uneasy with some of the consequences of quantum entanglement. If quantum mechanics were right, then a pair of entangled objects would behave as a single quantum system no matter how far apart the objects were. Altering the state of one of them should instantly alter the state of the second, with the change seemingly occurring faster than light could possibly travel between the two objects. This, Einstein argued, almost certainly had to be wrong.

Y2Kyoto: A Tip From An IPCC Insider

Roger Pielke Jr;

A high level participant in the IPCC (purposely vague to protect their identity) has confirmed to me that the major error on tropical cyclones that I recently identified was (a) indeed a major snafu and (b) a result of claims being inserted into the IPCC outside its review process. Neither of these things should happen in an process that the IPCC promotes as the “gold standard” of scientific assessment.

The error was to claim that a change in the proportion of Category 3-5 tropical cyclones has been detected and attributed to human-caused climate change, which is contrary to both evidence and the scientific literature. Even worse, in making the false claims the IPCC confused a study of measurements of tropical cyclones with tropical cyclones, and failed to acknowledge that paper had undergone a major correction, which altered its conclusions and rendered it irrelevant.

The false claim was not caught and was ultimately elevated by the IPCC to the summary of its recent Synthesis Report where it was promoted as one of the most significant scientific findings of the past assessment cycle. You can read all of the details on the error in this post and its follow up.

The tip that I received prompted me to go back and look carefully at the evolution of the drafting IPCC AR6, which was where the mistake made. I can confirm that the tip checks out. The IPCC failed to follow its own procedures of quality control and peer review. False information made its way into the report outside of the review process and was repeatedly elevated to the highest levels of information conveyed to policy makers.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Related: Now it turns out Canadian health officials knew ahead of time that the COVID-19 vaccinated likely carried the same viral load as the unvaccinated.

The Sound Of Settled Science

The science behind the claims that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas is pretty straightforward, if you look at only part of the science. Methane indeed traps more heat inside the atmosphere than CO2, by a wide margin. It disperses much more quickly, with a short life in the atmosphere, but if you only consider the warming impact it indeed is quite powerful.

That’s the reasoning behind the war on gas. But…

Y2Kyoto: Hide The Decline

Yet again, the National Post buries the news in the financial section;

… their findings “have strong implications for trends in climate model simulations and other observations” because the atmosphere has warmed at half the average rate predicted by climate models over the same period. They also note that their findings are “consistent with conclusions in McKitrick and Christy (2020),” namely that climate models have a pervasive global warming bias. In other research, Christy and mathematician Richard McNider have shown that the satellite warming rate implies the climate system can only be half as sensitive to GHGs as the average model used by the IPCC for projecting future warming.

The Sound Of Settled Science

el gato malo;

i have long been fascinated by the manner in which so much of what we “know” simply “isn’t so.” grand myths and misperceptions proliferate through our culture, our models of the world, and even in our scientific understandings. someone does a bad study, makes some wild claims, and decades go down the tubes as whole fields get led astray into rabbit warrens and the consciousness and belief set of the populace gets wedded to some form of compelling crackpottery or other.

there’s always “data.”

there’s always a loud proclamation.

and because it’s some simple seemingly telling claim, everyone jumps on board. mostly, they want to. people love stuff like this. they love “big, simple facts.”

but a shocking amount of it is just plain bunk generated by slanted study. this is sometimes unwitting, sometimes deliberate, but the effect is always the same:

you get told a big simple fact that is just plain wrong.

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