Normalized US Hurricane Losses 1900-2013

So, that’s why we stopped hearing about it…

… the scientific underpinnings of shaken baby syndrome have been called into question,” said Denise McWilliams, executive director of the project. “There’s a good amount of evidence that shaken baby syndrome might, at best, be questionable and it might, at worst, be totally bogus.”

Via WUWT;

A paper published in the Journal of Climate finds from 800,000 observations a significant decrease in longwave infrared radiation from increasing greenhouse gases over the 14 year period 1996-2010 in the US Great Plains. CO2 levels increased ~7% over this period and according to AGW theory, downwelling IR should have instead increased over this period.

So long as we’re still to blame. From the comments;

Maybe, just maybe there is a fundamental problem with using sheets of glass or plastic enclosing a space as an analogy for a free flowing gas of a planetary atmosphere …

WUWT: An updated list of at least 29 excuses for the 18 year ‘pause’ in global warming

“A courtesy note ahead of publication for Risbey et al. 2014″

The “Science Publishing Complex”;

Using the entire Scopus database, we estimated that there are 15,153,100 publishing scientists (distinct author identifiers) in the period 1996-2011. However, only 150,608 (<1%) of them have published something in each and every year in this 16-year period (uninterrupted, continuous presence [UCP] in the literature). This small core of scientists with UCP are far more cited than others, and they account for 41.7% of all papers in the same period and 87.1% of all papers with >1000 citations in the same period.

The evolving story of a word;

The patient, dedicated men and women, the living realities of the word scientist, working in laboratories and communicating in an esoteric language only with their peers, do not satisfy the general craving for definitive answers to social, economic, and political problems, which, so the great half-educated has been led to expect, ‘science ‘ has it in its power to deliver. An abstraction named ‘the scientist’ has been given form in people’s minds as a new figure of authority, corresponding to the priest or witch-doctor of a more primitive culture, whose ‘scientific’ statements can be accepted with child-like reliance. The notion is dangerous not merely because it is untrue but because it is irrational. The quest for absolute scientific validity is as hopeless as the quest for the philosopher’s stone. There may be incidental good in a political or religious philosophy that claims ‘Scientific’ authority and that stands ready to identify itself with the ready-made image in the popular mind of the infallibility of science; but the willingness to assume and exploit that role betrays the unprincipled shrewdness of the publicist.

The consensus biz takes another hit;

El Fin del Mundo is one of the oldest and southernmost Clovis sites ever discovered, according to University of Arizona archaeologist Vance Holliday, a co-author of the study announcing the find, released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Far from the famous Bering land bridge, the location has researchers questioning the origin of our early ancestors.
“I think sites like El Fin del Mundo really force us to rethink the process of the colonization of the Americas,” says archaeologist Thomas Jennings of the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, who was not part of the discovery team.
For a long time, Clovis culture was believed to have originated in the North American Southwest, south of the glaciers and Bering land bridge area. But the discovery of older Clovis sites in Texas and at El Fin del Mundo, which yielded nearly identical radiocarbon dates (13,400 years old), has cast doubts on that theory.

Nature;

When a team of cosmologists announced at a press conference in March that they had detected gravitational waves generated in the first instants after the Big Bang, the origins of the Universe were once again major news. The reported discovery created a worldwide sensation in the scientific community, the media and the public at large. […] Now, serious flaws in the analysis have been revealed that transform the sure detection into no detection. The search for gravitational waves must begin anew. The problem is that other effects, including light scattering from dust and the synchrotron radiation generated by electrons moving around galactic magnetic fields within our own Galaxy, can also produce these twists.
[…]
The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves was the ‘smoking gun’ proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible?
The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multi­verse, every­thing that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable.

It’s like climate science on a universal scale.

New York Times;

“We’ve had a rebound that we haven’t seen in many, many years,” said Gene Clark, a coastal engineer with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute in Superior, Wis. “We’ve been historically below average, and now we are finally back to above-average water levels.
[…]
The International Joint Commission, a group with members from the United States and Canada that advises on water resources, completed a five-year study in April 2013 concluding that water levels in the lakes were likely to drop even farther, in part because of the lack of precipitation in recent years brought on by climate change.

A good news story at odds with climate alarmist predictions? That’s what page A16 is for!
h/t Don