The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched down softly near the moon’s south pole today (Aug. 23), notching a huge milestone for the nation. India is now the fourth country to stick a lunar landing, after the United States, the former Soviet Union and China.
The historic touchdown occurred at 8:33 am ET (1233 GMT or 6:03 p.m. India Standard Time), according to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). “We have achieved soft landing on the moon! India is on the moon!” ISRO chairman Sreedhara Somanath announced after the landing.
Let’s Check In On California’s Permanent Drought
Via Brian Sullivan: 16 of California’s 17 reservoirs are now above historical average. 3 are close to capacity.
Put Down the Cookie
In video ad.
Y2Kyoto: The Science Police
This post is inspired by the successful efforts last week of climate activists — including three widely-cited scientists — to enforce misinformation by the legacy media. In a nutshell, ABC News wrote an accurate story about how climate was not a major or even significant factor in the Lahaina, Maui fire and disaster. After being mobbed by the enforcers, the story was changed to emphasize the role of climate. These sort of activist scientists who seek to enforce preferred public narratives have been called the “science police.”
Today’s post pushes back against this narrative enforcement with some actual science. Have a look at the panel below. It shows three versions of a climate time series for annual counts of North Atlantic major hurricanes from 1995 to 2050. Two of the graphs include a large change in climate, one of them does not.
I Feel Better Already
The Daily Sceptic- Why Medicine Safety Will Get Worse Not Better
Unlike other safety-critical sectors, medicine safety is managed in relative terms, not absolute. Take aviation for example. Aircraft are designed to meet absolute safety targets such as the number of fatal incidents per million flying hours. In contrast, MHRA do not set safety targets for licensed medicines like ‘no more than x deaths or y serious adverse events’. Instead, MHRA licenses a medicine if the clinical trials data indicate that ‘the benefits outweigh the risks’. That’s a charter for collateral damage to start with.
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
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
Where Would We Be Without Peer Review?
Tell Me You Have Secret Alien Technology
Without telling me you have secret alien technology.
Y2Kyoto: Run Fer Yer Lives!
What the IPCC really says about extreme weather.
…for those who want to know what research actually says on the relationship of extreme weather and climate change, that information is readily available. Today I’ll share the excellent work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarizing what its most recent assessment says about various types of extreme weather and climate change.
When you read the below you will realize that the difference between what you see in the news (including statements from leading scientists) and what the IPCC has concluded could not be more different. One day PhD dissertations will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic.
“Hot enough for you? No? Change the measurement.”
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.
Good Question
Trust the “experts”.
Maryanne Demasi, reports- What’s in the placebo?
We tried to find out what was in the “placebo pill” of one of the most controversial statin trials ever conducted.
…the exact formulation of a placebo is rarely disclosed in the peer-reviewed publication of a clinical trial. Further, medical journals do not require authors, nor drug manufacturers, to disclose the contents of a placebo or publish the CoA. Placebos may contain excipients such as chemicals, dyes, or allergens, which might unintentionally cause side effects, raising concerns about the reliability of trial data and the transparency of important information.
What Would We Do Without Researchers?
“Explain it to me like I’m 5”.
Two new Studies are underway at the University of Saskatchewan looking at a variety of factors that impact long-haul truck drivers in the province. One study is evaluating what benefits driving simulator training can offer truck drivers in Saskatchewan, and the second is looking to evaluate the amenities available at truck stops. PhD candidate Mackenzie McKeown is leading the studies. She joins Gormley to discuss the safety concerns she has about the current state of the trucking industry and how she hopes her studies will help create a better work environment for Saskatchewan Truckers.
If you can make it to the end, you’re a better person than I.
Y2Kyoto: When They Think No One Is Watching
@Kenneth72712993 points out that 90 papers were published on the warming hiatus which lasted from 1998 – 2015 with warming trend 0.03 C, yet now Hadcrut / UK Met Office shows this period warming at 0.14 C. pic.twitter.com/iVIQgHo4ui
— Siyu Yume (@SiyuYume) July 7, 2023
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
What Would We Do Without Leading Scholars?
Harvard behavior scientist who studied honesty accused of fabricating data
Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino allegedly chalked up phony results tied to studies, including one focused on honest behavior, the New York Times reported.
She’s been placed on leave, according to her business school web page, which the Times reported showed she was still on the job as recently as mid-May.
She has published 135 articles since 2007, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education.
In a blog, called DataColada, run by three behavioral scientists, it alleged fraud in four academic papers that Gino co-authored.
They said they presented evidence of fraud to Harvard in the fall of 2021 tied to a 2012 paper and another three papers she was a part of. […]
The accusations lodged against Gino were leading to major “reverberations in the academic community” because Gino has “so many collaborators, so many articles, who is really a leading scholar in the field,” he told the Times.
Gino has been honored as one of the top 40 Business Professors under 40 and has notched numerous awards.
It’s Probably Nothing
Avi Loeb, head of the Galileo Project;
On Run 6 of the magnetic sled through the likely crash site of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1, the expedition research team recovered shards of corroded iron. At first, we thought it may be common industrial iron associated with human-made ocean trash. But when Ryan Weed ran the sample of shards through the X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analyzer, the most likely alloy it flagged is X5 steel with titanium, which is also known as shock-resisting steel.
The yield strength of S5 steel, 1.7 GPa, is well above that of iron meteorites. This is consistent with the fact that IM1 was tougher in material strength than all other 272 meteors in the CNEOS catalog of NASA.
Most importantly, the shape of the recovered shards is nearly flat — as if they were surface layers broken off from a technological object which experienced extreme material stress.
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.
Y2Kyoto: Goodness! Gracious!
I’m reading a new paper claiming attribution of all increased burned area in CA to climate change
Turco et al in PNAS todayAnthropogenic climate change impacts exacerbate summer forest fires in California
They start their data in 1971 even though reliable data exists much earlier, so I’m curious …