Category: Unsettled Science

Ted Cruz vs. a Leftist Regurgitator

Baiting The Left Insufferable Twits Unsettled Science 35 Comments

Aaron Mair is the president of the Sierra Club in America. He’s not a scientist but a politician & social justice warrior. Here’s his LinkedIn summary:

Aaron Mair is a 31 year veteran urban environmental activist; regional and national Environmental Justice organizer and strategist from the State of New York.; Current National Board of Director of the Sierra Club (750,000 members); Former Atlantic Chapter Chair of 41,000-member NYS Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter; New Your State Pinbush Preserve Commissioner; New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Environmental Justice Advisory Group; Environmental Protection Agency Region Two, Year 2000 Citizen Environmentalist Activist Award recipient. Won a $1.6 million federal RCRA settlement with New York State for the community of Arbor Hill in Albany, New York and used it to create two nonprofit community service organizations.; 1990, 2000, & 2010 Reapportionment GIS technical expert to the Albany NAACP that won the creation of four majority Minority legislative seats in Albany County.

Senator Ted Cruz recently had some straightforward questions which Mr. Mair found very uncomfortable:

Note: The Sierra Club has some interesting preferences when it comes to political donations.

The Sound of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 5 Comments

Who would have thunk? 70% of the surface of the Earth may have more of an effect than previously thought.

Isoprene is a gas that is formed by both the vegetation and the oceans. It is very important for the climate because this gas can form particles that can become clouds and then later affect temperature and precipitation. Previously it was assumed that isoprene is primarily caused by biological processes from plankton in the sea water.

The Sound of Settled Science

Children R Our Future Unsettled Science You Might Be A Liberal 6 Comments

What is the opposite of diversity?

This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.

diversity-graph.jpg

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 12 Comments

The more I learn, the more I am convinced that 9 out of 10 “experts” are just making shit up.

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology aims to replicate 50 top cancer papers. The complete results are not yet in, in fact, the corresponding authors of most of the articles to be wholly or partially replicated have only been contacted for details and clarifications concerning the protocols of their experiments. The Reproducibility Project will only publish the final results of the 50 replications by the end of 2017!
Previous attempts at replicating cancer biology experiments indicated that reproducibility ranges from a dismal 10% to the very disappointing rate of 25%. These results mean that at least 75% of the money spend on cancer biology produces press releases rather than bona fide useful results.
Be that as it may, the people whose articles and experiments have been chosen for replication are up in arms. In an article in Science, their reactions are described as ranging “from annoyance to anxiety to outrage.”

Via James C. Coyne.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 14 Comments

Like most Southern children, I accepted, almost as a matter of faith, that kudzu grew a mile a minute and that its spread was unstoppable. I had no reason to doubt declarations that kudzu covered millions of acres, or that its rampant growth could consume a large American city each year. I believed, as many still do, that kudzu had eaten much of the South and would soon sink its teeth into the rest of the nation.
I’m not sure when I first began to doubt…

h/t Kathy Shaidle

What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

Science Unsettled Science 23 Comments

Major publisher retracts 64 scientific papers; (link fixed)

Made-up identities assigned to fake e-mail addresses. Real identities stolen for fraudulent reviews. Study authors who write glowing reviews of their own research, then pass them off as an independent report.
These are the tactics of peer review manipulators, an apparently growing problem in the world of academic publishing.
Peer review is supposed to be the pride of the rigorous academic publishing process. Journals get every paper reviewed and approved by experts in the field, ensuring that problematic research doesn’t make it to print.
But increasingly journals are finding out that those supposedly authoritative checks are being rigged.

h/t meatriarchy

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 22 Comments

Breakfast DENIERS!

As with many nutrition tips, though, including some offered by the Dietary Guidelines, the tidbit about skipping breakfast is based on scientific speculation, not certainty, and indeed, it may be completely unfounded, as the experiment in New York indicated.
At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was … the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change at all.
[…]
A closer look at the way that government nutritionists adopted the breakfast warning for the Dietary Guidelines shows how loose scientific guesses — possibly right, possibly wrong — can be elevated into hard-and-fast federal nutrition rules that are broadcast throughout the United States.

Y2Kyoto: Planetary Fever Update

Climate Cult Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 19 Comments

You mean that bright, glowing ball in the sky affects the climate?.

A mini ice age could hit the Earth in the 2030s, the first such event to occur since the early 1700s. New mathematical models of the Sun’s solar cycle developed at Northumbria University suggest solar activity will fall by 60 percent, causing temperatures on Earth to plummet.
The last mini ice age occurred between 1645 and 1715 and caused global temperatures to fall dramatically, with London’s River Thames freezing over during winter and sea ice extending for miles around the UK. The prolonged cold snap, known as the Maunder Minimum, was due to sunspots becoming exceedingly rare, as observed by scientists at the time.
Such periods were thought to be driven by convecting waves of fluids deep within the Sun, but new research suggests a second force — or “wave” — is at play. Two waves, operating at different layers in the Sun’s interior, are now believed to drive solar activity. When these waves are desynchronised, temperatures on Earth fall.

A bunch of people sent me this link. I didn’t post before now because it just seemed like old news for the audience here. But it’s a slow day, so here you go.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult climategate Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 12 Comments

“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it. The CO2-climate hysteria in Germany is propagated by people who are in it for lots of money, attention and power.”

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