Y2Kyoto: Planetary Fever Update
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
American Digest: The 8 Stages of Scam
The Sound Of Settled Science
“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.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Antarctic Penguins
Somebody’s napping at the Washington Post. These reports don’t generally survive the filter;
Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world.
Related? …the UK MET office has published a study which suggests solar activity is currently plummeting, the fastest rate of decline in 9300 years. The study also raises the odds of Maunder Minimum style conditions by 2050 from 8% to 15 – 20%.
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
You don’t say: While we don’t think that the initial claim–a quarter of cancer research is fake–is accurate, the fact that it’s closer to one in eight should still be troubling.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Vitamin D deficiency ‘not a factor in heart disease after all’
(h/t Rick)
The Sound Of Settled Science
In 1974, pediatrician William Crook wrote a letter to a medical journal in which he named cane sugar “a leading cause of hyperactivity” (what we now call ADHD). This truism has been so persistent that it was immortalized on an Old Navy “Let’s Blame the Sugar” T-shirt for babies. Researchers debated Crook’s claim for decades. The scientific consensus now? According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “more research discounts this idea than supports it.” They cite one study as a possible explanation for the myth’s persistence, in which “mothers who thought their children had gotten sugar rated them as more hyperactive […] compared to mothers who thought their children received aspartame.” It was belief about sugar’s ill effects that biased the mothers’ perception.
[…]
Real science, as Ioannidis reminds us, is slow and humble. Only time will tell if the current level of sugar alarmism is warranted, or if many years from now the comparison of sugar to cocaine will look a bit ridiculous. Should that be the case, governments and policymakers will be in the unenviable position of backtracking on yet another dietary guideline, further undermining the public’s trust in science as an enterprise. The research on sugar might be right – but our history of bias shows that we have a tendency to jump the gun on sugar due to moral furor.
We need a famine.
h/t Meatriarchy
The Sound Of Settled Science
In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. The discovery could have profound implications for diseases from autism to Alzheimer’s to multiple sclerosis.
h/t Chuck
The Sound Of Settled Science
In the Guardian, of all places;
The Bohannon hoax and LaCour/Green retraction have a lot in common. Scientific research was manufactured, which resulted in claims that appealed to some popular views, and the media broadly and uncritically promoted the results, advocating popular actions in response.
These two episodes highlight a more general problem: a lot of nonsense is published in the name of science. Writing in The Lancet last month, editor Richard Horton argued that as much as half of all scientific papers may simply be “untrue.” He writes: “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world.” The media, journal editors and universities also share blame, he wrote.
The hoax and retraction should help us to understand that a big part of the problem that Horton laments has little to do with research misconduct or fraud, though that is a problem too, but rather science working exactly as it should.
The Sound Of Settled Science
From the Journal of Preemptive Ass-Covering;
Scientists at the University of Southampton predict that a cooling of the Atlantic Ocean could cool global temperatures a half a degree Celsius and may offer a “brief respite from the persistent rise of global temperatures,” according to their study.
This cooling phase in the Atlantic will influence “temperature, rainfall, drought and even the frequency of hurricanes in many regions of the world,” says Dr. Gerard McCarthy. The study’s authors based their results on ocean sensor arrays and 100 years of sea-level data.
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Polar Ice Caps
@SteveSGoddard – Two decades of unprecedented melting has left Arctic sea ice almost identical to 20 years ago.
(Note: snow cover data not currently updating)
YNoKyoto
That’s right Graham, we unfunded bloggers and the few surviving skeptical scientists not evicted and blackballed from our universities (yet) have tricked 20% of the population because no one has put forward the climate change arguments except for: The Climate Commission, CSIRO, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, GE, Panasonic, The ABC, The BBC, The Guardian, Fairfax, The Australian government, most universities, The EU, The UN, The World Bank, and the IMF.
With a budget of nothing we’re winning. Why? We have nature on our side.* The world isn’t warming, the models can’t predict the real climate, and half the population have wised up to the propaganda. The main arguments of those who would control CO2 are not scientific, but insults and bluster, shutting up and disqualifying critics rather than answering politely, and producing the evidence. The University of Queensland offers a whole course in namecalling to train people to “engage” deniers. But the public know that the endless drought ended, the dams filled, the predictions were wrong and that “denier” is not science. Namecalling isn’t working anymore (so keep it coming Graham, it helps the skeptics 🙂 ).
The Sound Of Settled Science
Global temperature change observed over the last hundred years or so is well within the natural variability of the last 8,000 years, according to a new paper by a former Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) lead author.
Dr. Philip Lloyd, a South Africa-based physicist and climate researcher, examined ice core-based temperature data going back 8,000 years to gain perspective on the magnitude of global temperature changes over the 20th Century.
What Lloyd found was that the standard deviation of the temperature over the last 8,000 years was about 0.98 degrees Celsius- higher than the 0.85 degrees climate scientists say the world has warmed over the last century.
“This suggests that while some portion of the temperature change observed in the 20th century was probably caused by greenhouse gases, there is a strong likelihood that the major portion was due to natural variations,” Lloyd wrote in his study.
The Sound Of Settled Science
For years environmentalists have been raising alarms about the “bee-pocalypse”-a supposed catastrophic decline in honeybee populations-and calling for an immediate ban of a new class of state-of-the-art “systemic” pesticides called neonicotinoids (“neonics” for short) which they blamed for the die-offs.
The media were all over the story, endlessly replaying the environmentalist meme that without bees to pollinate our crops, “one-third of every bite of food we eat” would disappear. Banning neonics and saving bees was tantamount to saving the world from starvation.
Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blindingly Obvious
“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
YNoKyoto
News You Knew: Climate change a UN-led ruse
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business advisor on Friday claimed climate change was a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control. […]
Newman, a former chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, is a known climate change sceptic but he went further by accusing the UN of being involved in a scam.
“Figueres is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model,” he wrote.
“This is not about facts or logic. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN. It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.”[…]
Newman said “hopefully, like India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Tony Abbott isn’t listening (to the UN)”.
But he warned that “having gained so much ground, eco-catastrophists won’t let up”.
“After all, they have captured the UN and are extremely well-funded. They have a hugely powerful ally in the White House,” he said.
Y2Kyoto: The Global Warming Tipping Point
Reaches a tipping point.
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Polar Ice Caps
The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.
This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.
Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.