44 Replies to “The Sound Of Settled Science”

  1. Newton must be rolling in his grave.
    just reading Newton’s Principia circa 1665 , I mean wow. this guy was incredible. he didn’t work towards preconceived notions like the current Royal Society, he derived everything from first principles,and then went out an confirmed it with crude clocks and pendulums, even figuring where temperature errors could occur.

  2. Cal2
    in Newton’s time principles still ruled, today EGOs and funding rule, science be damned.
    I’v watched this “climate” fiasco sine early 70T’s, and the methodology sucks. Yet even so, I’m still surprized at the scope of the “errors”

  3. Nothing to see here; I’d be surprised if they even bothered to check calculations, after all, I just came from my daughters PTI and I’ve been advised that the kids will not be receiving a mark for Social or Science even though it will appear on their report cards.

  4. This is where the following adage is appropriate:
    “Figures don’t lie, but LIARS sure do FIGURE.”
    Cheers
    Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
    1st Saint Nicolaas Army
    Army Group “True North”

  7. Apparently,the Royal Society finds math hard, covering up and lying EASY.
    Doesn’t speak too well of them,does it.

  8. Is Al Gore in the room?
    And James Hansen? Prince Charles? Suzuki? Jeffy Simpson? John Cross? And Canada’s Elizabeth Barbie? All raise your hand, please.
    And, also, make that all the world’s politicians – except for Vaclav Klaus.
    And all the world’s media, excepting a handful of Journalists and Rex Murphy.
    Ya all better latch onto a good lawyer as the Mother-Of-All-Lawsuits is coming down the pipe. Trillion dollar frauds have consequences.

  9. “I just came from my daughters PTI and I’ve been advised that the kids will not be receiving a mark for Social or Science even though it will appear on their report cards.” That is tragic…tragic for their personal futures and for that of society in general. That’s “dumbing down”, perpetrated by lazy, unionized, job&salary&benefits&pension-protected “teachers”.

  10. Dave
    I literally told the instructor this ” quite frankly I don’t give a damn what you do in this classroom, or how you evaluate these kids. I’m strictly concerned about outcomes, and I only ask that you provide me (weekly) a detailed schedule for my daughters assignments (which are not marked btw, NONE OF THEM!), and I will evaluate and make sure my daughter is completing the material myself” Then I proceeded to apologize for being “crass” and I wished her the best of luck with her class and all of the kids and the new methods.
    It’s my view that these new “methods” are intended to blur the evaluations of all students, to ensure the perception of success for the public school system. So if I can assume that my child is going to “pass” regardless of her knowledge, my focus as a parent must be making sure my kid learns the material. I believe the root cause of these new methods is the belief by academia that marks, diplomas and degrees are the ends to the means, when in fact they are worthless without the knowledge that is suppose to accompany them. But what do you expect, when the teachers and instructors themselves truly never leave school.
    In my Utopia, all teachers would have to work a minimum of 5 years in a non related (private) industry before they can get a job in education.
    Sorry for the OT comments Kate.

  11. Its amazing what hijinks so-called experts can get up to when they don’t have to share their data or show their work.
    These aren’t “mistakes”. Guys with PhDs in the sciences don’t make elementary errors in arithmetic. Its the same scam as the gun control scam: lie, deny, obfuscate, fabricate.
    They just present their lie, and then mao-mao the hell out of anybody who challenges them. Dr. Fruitfly is a master of the mao-mao technique, every time he opens his mouth that’s all that comes out.

  12. The only way I would have notice anything at all happening at CBC is if it happened during their Saturday hockey game broadcasts.

  14. It will be excused as an unintentional mistake – no big deal. These things happen in reports that are hundreds of pages long, dontchaknow. Oddly, these “random” errors only occur (and never get caught by peer reviewers) in science that enthusiastically supports the catastrophic AGW hypothesis. Weird science, I’d say.

  15. phil, dizzy – you reading? Your house of cards is coming down, all over the world. Time for adolescents in big bodies to grow the hell up.

  16. Not only has he overturned the view that CO2 is a long-term problem; last month he refuted Ocean acidification.
    Too bad he hides his light under a bushel at canadafreepress.
    From his August Ocean Acidification and the CO2-Propaganda
    // Now, as the earth does not become rapidly overheated from CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, nor the Arctic sea ice disappearing, nor the Pacific atolls drowning, nor the Amazonian jungle drying up, all as previously touted by the IPCC and their gendarmes and adjuvants, a new slogan on the supposed danger of CO2 is increasingly being heard, namely “Ocean Acidification”.
    The supposedly happening Ocean Acidification, frequently termed “the other effect of CO2”, is largely based on unrealistic biological experiments, actual measurements over an insufficient time to allow any definite trend delineation, and a lack of understanding of the chemistry involved. //
    Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser Saturday, August 14, 2010

  17. Yet another Global Warming story we WON’T see on the CBC tonight, with NO hour-long discussions by Suzuki and McDonald.

  18. Sigh. You snarkily mock what you think is the RS’s inability to understand and compute basic mathematics by citing a guy who employs a ridiculously over-simplistic plus/minus calculation to what is a clearly a complex geophysical process, and you think you’ve won the argument?
    Even a cursory web search of the issue uncovers this, from Wikipedia (“Carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere” entry)…
    “The Earth’s oceans contain a huge amount of carbon dioxide in the form of bicarbonate and carbonate ions — much more than the amount in the atmosphere. The bicarbonate is produced in reactions between rock, water, and carbon dioxide…Reactions like this tend to buffer changes in atmospheric CO2…Over hundreds of millions of years this has produced huge quantities of carbonate rocks. Ultimately, most of the CO2 emitted by human activities will dissolve in the ocean[23], however the rate at which the ocean will take it up in the future is less certain.”
    …and this, from ScienceDaily (sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070517142558.htm):
    “Scientists have observed the first evidence that the Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb the major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has weakened by about 15 per cent per decade since 1981.”
    …which together, along with other data points, constitute the beginnings of a more complete explanation that correspond to what the RS report states:
    “Once atmospheric CO2 concentrations are increased, carbon cycle models (which simulate the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, soils and plants) indicate that it would take a very long time for that increased CO2 to disappear; this is mainly due to well-known chemical reactions in the ocean mainly due to well-known chemical reactions in the ocean.”
    You can and should critique the science and the carbon cycle models on their own merits, but mocking the RS on spurious, ill-informed, and clearly ideologically motivated grounds serves only to expose yourself as a fool who doesn’t even understand what you’re attacking.

  19. Things that belong together: Spinach, Popeye, Wine, CO2 and the Royal Society.
    Exert from an excellent report written by a Capital Management Strategist entitled “See for Yourself” on the topic of scientific papers referring to one another and the propagation of mathematical error; interestingly enough, he his report includes a significant reference to the Royal Society.
    Nullius in Verba
    “The motto for the Royal Society, an academy of science founded in 1660, is “nullius in verba,”
    which means “take no one’s word for it.” In business and markets, certain ideas or beliefs seem to perpetuate without a solid foundation in the facts. The Royal Society’s motto has served it well for 350 years and remains excellent advice today. As Dan Brown writes in his latest thriller, The Lost Symbol, “wide acceptance of an idea is not proof of its validity.”…
    “We are all exposed to large amounts of information and have too much to sort through carefully.But our minds generally filter information without much effort, and the typical default is to accept what we believe to be true (often the conventional wisdom) and ignore pretty much everything else. Problems arise, however, when we accept ideas without verifying the veracity of the claim. As we have seen, some of our beliefs are built on errors and others are built on unsubstantiated claims. As a result, it is important to periodically revisit and challenge your beliefs no matter the source of the (mis)information. While this is intellectually taxing, it can also be the
    source of an important edge.”
    http://www.lmcm.com/pdf/SeeForYourself.pdf

  20. Davenport: “It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young,” said Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian ethnologist and Nobel laureate.
    Another excellent paper regarding damaging consequences of scientific errors – examples provided.
    European Molecular Biology Organization
    Science and Society
    Analysis
    The consequence of errors
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299297/

  21. Yes, dizzy…slow down and listen…the good Dr. Kaiser was providing still more useful refutation of crap science…thanks for pointing out like you always do…there’s a good lad, you may go and get your sweet now.
    @Sofa: now, we don’t think we’ve won the argument; we know we have, and have known for a very long time. Now STFU you stupid bloody tool.

  22. Thanks for that link No-One – just like Climategate eh? Crap, errors, bias, grant awards, ego, tenure, and so on…yes siree.

  23. So does Dr. Kaiser now get to press a red button?
    You know..sauce for the goose etc.

  24. Indiana:
    My two girls are in the TOPS program at Marc Garneau CI in Toronto. This program draws kids from all across the GTA (mine are from Richmond Hill; others are from Whitby, Mississauga, etc.). These kids are all very bright, and the competition for marks is fierce. Everything gets marked, and the teachers are what we called in my day “hard markers”. Personally, I think the English teacher my elder daughter had last year was a fool, but her math and science teachers are sharp, dedicated, and no-nonsense.
    Just saying there are some teachers in the public system who really care; I’m not surprised they gravitate to specialty programs, where they get to teach kids who are bright and motivated, instead of the usual dull-eyed slackers I see hanging out in malls.

  25. Yes, davenport the over-reliance on models is the problem. In the absence of observed data from long term studies, climate science defers to models. Do you have any idea about how many of these models been proved accurate? 1,20,100…or 0?? Until the models are confirmed climate change “science” is speculative, at best.
    The Royal Society, in a roundabout way is already backtracking. Their endorsement was recently reviewed and they changed from true believer to hedging their bets:
    “The new guide says: “The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty.”
    The Royal Society even appears to criticise scientists who have made predictions about heatwaves and rising sea levels. It now says: “There is little confidence in specific projections of future regional climate change, except at continental scales.”
    It adds: “It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future.
    “There remains the possibility that hitherto unknown aspects of the climate and climate change could emerge and lead to significant modifications in our understanding.””

  27. Its a bit of bliss watching the Green fanatics Con unravel before our eye’s. Scary though they almost got away with this BS.
    Watching the Self Righteous cultists of Green squealing like pigs when the Axe man has shown his instrument of Justice.
    Its amazing what a little Dump (data) will do for reality.
    You just want to float away, like chains had been removed.
    JMO

  28. No-One @ 3:35 PM – Quotes from anything written by Dan Brown are hardly what’s needed at this time, in support of your contentions. Even if it seems to support same.

  29. Davenport: “…but mocking the RS on spurious, ill-informed, and clearly ideologically motivated grounds…”
    As opposed to mocking them because everything they do seems to somehow support whatever hobby horse the Labour Party is riding at the time? Or mocking them for still pretending Climategate didn’t happen?
    There’s a lot of mockery yet to be delivered, Davenport. Catching them with their hand in the cookie jar, again, one simply can’t resist.
    Global warming is a scam. A politically motivated, money making, freedom destroying -scam-, Davenport. That makes you either a scammer or a Useful Idiot. As you seem determined to keep beating this dead horse despite the ever growing mountain of evidence showing its appalling dead-ness, I’m forced to lean more to choice number two.
    Its deceased, my dear. Gone to meet its maker. Its not going to get up and pull your little red wagon.

  30. @LC Bennett: It cuts both ways, LC. If you (and Watts) are willing to treat the Royal Society’s hedges as credible — that it, you accept their conclusion that significant uncertainties remain in the science of climate change — then you should also treat the rest of their conclusions as credible as well. To do otherwise would be to cherry-pick the evidence to suit your preconceived biases. Which would be exactly what you accuse your opponents of doing.
    And what are those rest of the RS’s conclusions? As follows:
    “There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the last half century. This warming trend is expected to continue as are changes in precipitation over the long term in many regions. Further and more rapid increases in sea level are likely which will have profound implications for coastal communities and ecosystems.
    “Like many important decisions, policy choices about climate change have to be made in the absence of perfect knowledge. Even if the remaining uncertainties were substantially resolved, the wide variety of interests, cultures and beliefs in society would make consensus about such choices difficult to achieve. However, the potential impacts of climate change are sufficiently serious that important decisions will need to be made.”

  31. The legal principle “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”, applies, if part of a statement is untrue, the rest is presumed untrue. Does no good to obfuscate, spin, weasel, the RS did not check one of its facts – tough – so all its “facts” are suspect.

  32. @The Phantom: “Catching them with their hand in the cookie jar, again, one simply can’t resist.”
    That’s just it, Phantom — they weren’t actually caught with their hands in the cookie jar this time. If you actually bother to read Kaiser’s CFP article, you’d realize that he’s the one in this case making strong claims based on weak evidence.
    The problem is, folks here are so accustomed to nodding their heads in unison to anything that purports to attack the AGW thesis that they either can’t or won’t bother to separate the legitimate critiques from the cranks. And once you do that, you give up any pretense of acting in a reasonable, dispassionate, level-headed manner. You’re just an ideologue with your own pre-existing agenda, no different from those you seek to mock.
    “Global warming is a scam. A politically motivated, money making, freedom destroying -scam-, Davenport.”
    Except that researchers first started warning about global warming and climate change 40 years ago, way before it was academically fashionable, politically expedient, or financially beneficial to do so.
    “As you seem determined to keep beating this dead horse despite the ever growing mountain of evidence showing its appalling dead-ness…”
    Judging by your willingness here to accept on faith Kaiser’s accusations against the RS, somehow I doubt that you possess the capacity to differentiate between a “mountain of evidence” and a mountain of crap.

  33. @oldfart: “The legal principle “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”, applies…”
    Um, no it doesn’t:
    “Here’s the core problem. FIUFIO is a legal principle, not a scientific or investigative principle. It is primarily used (and makes sense) in the courtroom…The problem is, this principle doesn’t work in science. Why?…It shows ignorance of how science works. Yes, science has been wrong, but the scientific method is self-correcting. And it is always scientists who have unearthed new evidence who do the correcting, never people who ignore the scientific method…In addition, FIUFIO creates a false dichotomy regarding scientific or historical understanding: Either everything is correct, or nothing is true. A single inconsistency, no matter how peripheral or unrelated, is reason enough for cranks to make a sweeping claim that the whole edifice is crumbling. Clearly this is far too simplistic and excludes other possibilities.” (scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/06/a_cranks_favorite_gambit_falsu_1.php)

  34. Apparently b.s. has a longer half life, since it has been in the air for thirty years without showing any sign of dissipating.

  35. @davenport
    FIUFIO always applies to ma single document in business, law, politics and science. In this case it most definitely applies, since CO2 halflife in the atmosphere affects their predictions. This falsehood makes
    the entire RS paper pure and absolute bullshit, no matter how many warmist say otherwise. The CO2 halflife error is an absolute scientific disgrace, worthy of a Canadian academic, federal bureaucrat, or politician. Either the authors were ignorant, or they didn’t check their facts or both. Spouting effete elite liberal propaganda suggests that the author(s) were either bureaucrats or otherwise on the public payroll.

  36. larben: Duly noted. Personally, I wince at the mention of the Brown’s name for the very reason that his fiction is “widely accepted as truth”
    The irony and oxymorn in that first paragraph was just too much to resist – upon reading it – I found myself in double double think.
    A strategist givng The Royal Society credence through a quote by a writer of fiction stories, who has managed to persuade a significant portion of the population that his fiction stories are truth coupled with the Royal Society’s motto of “take no one’s word for it” weaved in was either pure genius or an unintended oversight.

  37. Thanks No-One, I may be just a bit tetchy on the matter, being Catholic, but the line did fit well , no doubt, with most.

  41. Here is the awful mistake that the Royal Society statment makes —
    “Current understanding indicates that even if there was a complete cessation of emissions of CO2 today from human activity, it would take several millennia for CO2 concentrations to return to preindustrial concentrations”
    John O’Sullivan, reporting on
    Royal Society Humiliated by Global Warming Basic Math Error
    // German born chemist, Dr Klaus L. E. Kaiser has published evidence that proves the Royal Society (RS), London, has been caught out making schoolboy errors in mathematical calculations over the duration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere. […]A gaffe in their own basic calculations led the RS to falsely find that CO2 would stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years rather than a dozen or so as per peer-reviewed studies show. //
    So I eagerly went do Dr. Kaiser’s article to consult these peer-reviewed studies, and found
    / / Furthermore, there are several peer-reviewed papers reporting the half life of CO2 in the atmosphere to be between 5 and 10 years. //
    That’s it. He has a couple of references, but not to the peer-reviewed studies.
    O’Sullivan mentions a prominent Swedish mathematician has written in support.
    Unfortunately, there is no math there. Just [paraphrased] //the RS was wrong, can’t do math & never could, why look at Samuel Pepys! //
    So where to go. How about the RS statement? Say the sentence just before the awful one?
    // Once atmospheric CO2 concentrations are increased, carbon cycle models (which simulate the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, soils and plants) indicate that it would take a very long time for that increased CO2 to disappear; this is mainly due to well-known chemical reactions in the ocean. //
    Here’s a peer-reviewed article —
    Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time
    // David Archer Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA 21 September 2005.
    ABSTRACT A model of the ocean and seafloor carbon cycle is subjected to injection of new CO2 pulses of varying sizes to estimate the resident atmospheric fraction over the coming
    100 kyr. The model is used to separate the processes of air-sea equilibrium, an ocean temperature feedback, CaCO3 compensation, and silicate weathering on the residual
    anthropogenic pCO2 in the atmosphere at 1, 10, and 100 kyr. The mean lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 is dominated by the long tail, resulting in a range of 30–35 kyr. The
    long lifetime of fossil fuel carbon release implies that the anthropogenic climate perturbation may have time to interact with ice sheets, methane clathrate deposits, and
    glacial/interglacial climate dynamics. //
    Kaiser is a chemist. So one can assume that he knows about such things. He pretends to wonder why CO2 doesn’t DOUBLE in 15 years as his calculations shows it should, and then presents, AS NEWS, that CO2 is absorbed by oceans. The fate of an individual CO2 molecule is to be part of such ocean-atmospheric interactions within a few years. But CO2 moves FROM ocean to atmosphere too, & if CO2 were removed from the atmoshere that would be the dominant direction until new equilibrium is established in [see abstract above]
    Indidently, 2010 is the 350th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Society

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