Science! Settled!
“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” says Scaife. With solar physicists predicting a long-term reduction in the intensity of the solar cycle – and possibly its complete disappearance for a few decades, as happened during the so-called Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 – this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.
[T]he ancient origins of an animal that is an honorary member of many human families has remained in doubt: We still don’t know where dogs came from.
A group of scientists who are in the middle of a grand examination of canine fossils and modern DNA proposed Thursday to turn the whole conversation on its head.
Suppose dogs didn’t evolve in one place, they suggested, but two. What if domestication of ancient wolves happened in both Asia and Europe — different wolves, different people?
Or even more likely, in several places, by many different peoples.
h/t Canadian Observer
The scientific method, illustrated;
[A] researcher who provided key evidence of (non-celiac disease) gluten sensitivity recently published follow-up papers that show the opposite. […]
The subjects cycled through high-gluten, low-gluten, and no-gluten (placebo) diets, without knowing which diet plan they were on at any given time. In the end, all of the treatment diets – even the placebo diet – caused pain, bloating, nausea, and gas to a similar degree. It didn’t matter if the diet contained gluten. (Read more about the study.)
“In contrast to our first study… we could find absolutely no specific response to gluten,” Gibson wrote in the paper. A third, larger study published this month has confirmed the findings.
Bravo.
Global temperatures have plummeted more than 0.5C this year, and are falling 2nd fastest in the satellite record pic.twitter.com/WD1lXjicaN
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) July 7, 2016
Some of the earliest humans to inhabit America came from Europe according to a new book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. The book puts forward a compelling case for people from northern Spain traveling to America by boat, following the edge of a sea ice shelf that connected Europe and America during the last Ice Age, 14,000 to 25,000 years ago.
“Across Atlantic Ice : The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture” Across Atlantic Ice is the result of more than a decade’s research by leading archaeologists Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Through archaeological evidence, they turn the long-held theory of the origins of New World populations on its head.
This failure in economic literature is relevant to climate science because not only are the dynamics we’ve seen in economic science demonstrated similar to climate science, but also both fields have large influences on public policy — in part due to politicians confidence in peer reviewed literature.
The point is that many human emotions, including nepotism, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, and ideological biases go into the peer review process. It would be refreshing if we interpreted the “peer-reviewed” sign of approval as the flawed signal that it is, particularly in areas where there seems to be a larger narrative that must be served. The peer-review process may well be the worst way of advancing scientific knowledge-except for all the others.
Do Ontario’s teachers know their pension fund owns the Sydney Desalination Plant?
Warragamba Dam close to bursting after state cops another east coast low […]
By Sunday evening the heaviest-hit sections of Sydney experienced rainfalls around 35mm, with 39mm saturating Frenchs Forest and more predicted.
(h/t Another Ian)
Foiled again! Study claiming psychotic traits linked to conservatism gets reversed…
The sun has gone completely blank.
Using recent advancements in Australian telescope technology, a Monash University-led research team has made an unexpected discovery that a large group of stars are dying prematurely, challenging our accepted view of stellar evolution. […]
While the cause of this remains a mystery, the HERMES chemical analysis has revealed that premature death tends to only occur in the sodium-rich/oxygen-poor stars. The surprising thing is that our best models of these stars do not predict that they will die young.
h/t meatriarchy
Actual, original data have been changed so much and so often that they are almost unrecognizable from the original entries. For example, the 0.7 degree Celsius (1.3F) of cooling between 1940 and the 1970s – which had the world worried about another Little Ice Age – has simply “disappeared” in these corrupted-computer-model re-writes of history.
Throwing phrases like “arc of the moral universe,” “right side of history,” and “settled science” on the dustbin of history:
What does the president also mean by the “right” and “wrong” side of history, other than equating his side with “right” and thus historically, morally, and logically inevitable? But history has no such predetermined Hegelian course. Roman republicanism and classical culture were certainly on the right side of history for centuries–until life in AD 500 insidiously became far more dangerous, brutish, and materially impoverished. Beheading was supposed to be the signature of past savages, not the highlight of twenty-first-century video ads for ISIS recruitment.
Did Europe come to the “end” of its history with the European Union or is the confederation’s unworkability leading to a return of centuries of national rivalries? In the 1990s, various manifestations of the so-called Schengen Agreement establishing a borderless free passage zone between sovereign European nations was declared a harbinger–later along with the Euro–of an inevitable pan-European borderless community. That one-world arc was also the dream of Roman Emperors, Napoleon, and the drafters of the League of Nations. But by 2016, Schengen, when coupled with Europe’s inability to control its borders on the Mediterranean, had proved a disaster. Was the German mark or Greek drachma relegated to the wrong side of history; or will both reemerge soon from its right side?
(h/t Instapundit)
Honeybee populations across Canada are at record levels and honeybee populations are not declining, said Hoover.
“We do, in fact, have more honeybee colonies in Canada than we have ever had before,” she said at the canola Science-O-Rama event here earlier this month.
It was one of the largest, most rigorous experiments ever conducted on an important diet question: How do fatty foods affect our health? Yet it took more than 40 years — that is, until today — for a clear picture of the results to reach the public.
The fuller results appeared Tuesday in BMJ, a medical journal, featuring some never-before-published data. Collectively, the fuller results undermine the conventional wisdom regarding dietary fat that has persisted for decades and is still enshrined in influential publications such as the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. But the long-belated saga of the Minnesota Coronary Experiment may also make a broader point about how science gets done: it suggests just how difficult it can be for new evidence to see the light of day when it contradicts widely held theories.
If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yudkin belies that interpretation. It suggests instead that this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us.
We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way while everyone around him turns 180 degrees.
From some crackpot Big Oil funded denier website;
The scientists found that over the last 40 years, stream temperatures warmed at the average rate of 0.10 degrees Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. This translates to thermal habitats shifting upstream at a rate of only 300-500 meters (0.18-0.31 miles) per decade in headwater mountain streams where many sensitive cold-water species currently live. The authors are quick to point out that climate change is still detrimentally affecting the habitats of those species, but at a much slower rate than dozens of previous studies forecast. The results of this study indicate that many populations of cold-water species will continue to persist this century and mountain landscapes will play an increasingly important role in that preservation.
Wait. There exist species capable of life in an environment with temperature deviations of .1 Celsius per decade? Charles Darwin, call your office.
Related: Climate model predictions on rain and drought wrong, says study
h/t Imethisguy
Safe spaces for scientists: In a sign that the nutrition space is as defensive as ever, Nina Teicholz, an author who has publicly criticized the science behind the government’s low-fat dietary advice, was recently bumped from a nutrition science panel after being confirmed by the National Food Policy Conference. […] Teicholz said she was disinvited after other panelists said they wouldn’t participate with her.
…there’s probably no field of journalism that’s less skeptical, less critical, less given to investigative work, and less independent of its sources than science reporting. At even the most respected publications, science journalists tend to position themselves as translators, churning the technical language of scientific papers into summaries that are accessible to the public. The assumption is that the source text they’re translating–the original scientific research–comes to them as unimpeachable fact.
Flashback: “Kevin, Gavin, Mike, It’s Seth again.”