Category: Science

Food for Thought

Science 22 Comments

A fascinating discussion on everything to do with brain health.

Yes, it’s two hours. No, there’s not a Coles notes version. Yes, we are well aware that not everyone has the time or ability to listen to a two hour podcast but a surprising number of you do seem to have the time to complain about it in the comments every time we post one. There’s plenty of quick hit content on the blog as well.

The first couple of minutes gives you a good overview of the podcast. It is time stamped so you can check out clips on specific topics if you like.

Audio only version

What Would We Do Without Models?

Unsettled Science 19 Comments

Morning update: Scenes of significant damage are beginning to come in.

Morning devastation.

If you’re anywhere near Acapulco, take cover.

In a shocking turn of events, Hurricane #Otis in the Eastern Pacific has unexpectedly, explosively intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane in just 12 hours.

Even worse, the storm is expected to make a catastrophic landfall tonight as a Category 5 hurricane near Acapulco, Mexico, home to 1 million people.

Only 18 hours ago, people were expecting a tropical storm at landfall, and now a devastating Category 5 storm is likely.

This is pretty much a worst-case scenario, as residents have little time to find a safe shelter and protect life and property from this life-threatening storm.

A major hurricane (Category 3+) has never made landfall within 50 miles of Acapulco, let alone a Category 5 hurricane.

Otis could become the first Eastern Pacific hurricane ever recorded to make landfall as a Category 5 in Mexico.

Anyone in or near Acapulco should rush storm preparations to completion as their is little time left to shelter from #Otis.

Ryan Maue – “Nightmare scenario” for coastal Mexico…

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 30 Comments

How Could the IPCC Make an Error this Large?

Earlier this week I discussed the mystifying continued prioritization of the outdated and implausible RCP8.5 scenario by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in its scenarios expected to guide Dutch climate policies for the next decade. Since then I have heard from many friends and colleagues in the Netherlands offering a wide range of perspectives on what happened and what should happen next.

These exchanges have prompted me to summarize how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has treated climate scenarios in its most recent assessment reports. Today I document a major error made by the IPCC in its fifth assessment report (AR5) which has had profound consequences for climate research and policy in the decade since.

Settle in, this one is a doozy.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 24 Comments

Roger Pielke Jr;

In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising: [A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.

The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.

Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom…

“In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion.”

Groomers I, Napoleon Science 28 Comments

What would we do without research?

In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next 7 years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition.

In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa. The condition was included in the DSM-III the following year. Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women.

The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this way Bulimia entered the lexicon via women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.

Confirmation bias

Cronies Media Science 43 Comments

Liberal water carrier Frank Graves has released a new “poll” which purports to show that conservative voters overwhelmingly buy into “disinformation”. Not surprisingly, his definition of disinformation is tailor-made to get the polling results he wanted. If you differ with his view on any of these questions, well, you are simply disinformed:

-Canada’s economic growth lags well behind the G7 average;

-Vaccine-related deaths are being concealed from the public;

-The right to bear arms is guaranteed in Canada’s constitution;

-Climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

 

What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

Khmer Noir Science The Tolerant Left 27 Comments

NY Post;

Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart was a guru of the claim that “systemic racism” infests America’s police and American society.

Now he’s out of a job on account of “extreme negligence” in his research.

The academic was fired after almost 20 years of his data — including figures used in an explosive study, which claimed the legacy of lynchings made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives — were found to be in question.

College authorities said he was being fired for “incompetence” and “false results.”

Among the studies he has had to retract were claims that whites wanted longer sentences for blacks and Latinos.

The Sound Of Settled Science

climategate Unsettled Science 38 Comments

Daily Mail;

A climate change scientist has claimed the world’s leading academic journals reject papers which don’t ‘support certain narratives’ about the issue and instead favor ‘distorted’ research which hypes up dangers rather than solutions.

Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, said editors at Nature and Science – two of the most prestigious scientific journals – select ‘climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives’.

In an article for The Free Press, Brown likened the approach to the way ‘the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause’ of wildfires, including the recent devastating fires in Hawaii. He pointed out research that said 80 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans.

Brown gave the example of a paper he recently authored titled ‘Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California’. Brown said the paper, published in Nature last week, ‘focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior’ and ignored other key factors.

Brown laid out his claims in an article titled ‘I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published‘. ‘I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work,’ the article begins.

Good for him.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Science Unsettled Science 143 Comments

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.

Launched at the end of 2021 as a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb, a tool with unmatched powers of observation, is on an exciting mission to look back in time, in effect, at the first stars and galaxies. But one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.

According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.

The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

Science 19 Comments

Just The News;

A top international science journal funded by the federal government recently acknowledged that thousands of its published research papers may contain misleading language.

More than 2,600 of the papers from “Science,” the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the world’s top academic journals, were examined in depth by another research journal, “Scientometrics.” It found in a study that from 1997 to 2021, the use of “hedging” words have fallen by about 40%.

The study’s co-author and Nanjing University linguist Ying Wei said this revelation ought to be concerning because “essentially, the nature of academic knowledge is indeterminate.”

In academic writing, “hedging” means using cautious language (i.e., “could” or “appear to”) to avoid sounding overconfident and giving readers a misleading conclusion.

In 1997, there were about 115.8 hedging examples per 10,000 words. But by 2021, there were only 67.42 for the same amount.

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