Category: Unsettled Science

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 29 Comments

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.

Climategate: Tortured Temperatures

climategate2 Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 8 Comments

In 2007 I started monitoring a few GISS stations. Amundsen-Scott, Vostok, Halley, Davis in Antarctica. Then a few more over the years. It was just to check some of the claims of data changing. Also to see if I could plot the temps over time. Some small changes at first, but nothing of concern.
In 2008 I added more stations such as Nuuk, to check more claims. It is easy to save the temp files for each station. Picking a few stations at random points around the GISS globe, up to about 12.
Goddard was right. Past data points were changing. Usually small amounts on a monthly basis. Some station data did not change at all, but only the new monthly data were added.
In 2009 I was saving monthly data for 15 stations.Every month the most recent data is added to the end of each file. But, scanning past data it became apparent that some historical station data was being “revised” almost completely. That means that a time plot shifted by enough to notice on a temperature plot. Usually the “new” plot showed that the past became cooler. Small amounts, maybe one tenth of a degree. When I got to 20 stations, I noticed that one or two sets of data were being extensively revised every month. At the end of 2009 there was a sudden revision of more stations by larger amounts. Almost always the data before 1960 was getting cooler.
By 2010 I was up to 30 stations, plus the Antarctic four.
Akureyri, Bartow, Beaver City, Concordia, Crete NE, Ellsworth, Franklin, Gothenburg, Hanford, Honolulu, Hilo, Jan Mayen, Kodiak, Kwajaalein, La Serena, Loup City, Minden, Nantes, Nome, Norfolk Island, Nuuk, Red Cloud, St. Helena, St. Paul, Steffenville, Thiruvanantha, Truk, Wakeeny, Yakutat, Yamba.
Downloading 30 sets of temperature data to save. Then putting all data into an excel file to make plots. Then comparing time plots to see where individual data points had changed. It became clear that a regular revision of about 10 percent of all GISS stations was taking place on a monthly basis.
Every month in 2010, three of the 30 stations has changes to past data points that were visible by plotting. Looking at every point for every station is not possible, but scanning at random shows that many stations have small changes. 2011 was about the same, but at the end of 2011 was another substantial change to many stations.
In early 2012 my 10 year old hard drive died. I had a separate backup, but it was found to be virus infected to the extent that I could not save all data. I still have the drive and can open some files but can’t copy files to another drive.
In 2012 GISS began making larger changes to more past data. Some stations were showing monthly changes that could only be described as “erratic” with some large shifts for a couple months, followed by data returning to values from months earlier. Sometime in December 2012 was a very large change in past data for many stations. Some stations showed data that stopped in 2007 or 2008. In March 2013 those stations were suddenly “restored” and resumed showing complete data up to March 2013.
Every month GISS changes past data by small amounts to some historical data. Some stations are being selected for larger revisions at random times. For some stations, portions of data from decades ago vanishes completely. The numbers are replaced with “999.9″ indicating no data. Months later those same past data points re-appear, just as they were before, sometimes with small adjustments. If what is happening to a sample of 30 stations is any indication of the entire GISS data set, then I’d say that there is an Orwellian plot to manipulate the past.
There is no record of these past changes, it would be impossible to verify or reproduce those changes. Over the years, the past keeps getting colder.

h/t John Groves

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 7 Comments

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

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 19 Comments

New research published today (Friday 27th June 2014) in the journal Nature Scientific Reports has provided a major new theory on the cause of the ice age that covered large parts of the Northern Hemisphere 2.6 million years ago.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Alternative Subsidy Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 28 Comments

New solar model predicts imminent global cooling;

As we head to the UNFCCC meeting in Paris 2015 where global bureaucracy beckons, a sharp cooling change appears to be developing and set to hit in the next five years. Yet consortia of five-star politicans are not preparing for climate change, only for global warming. Around the world a billion dollars a day is invested in renewable energy, largely with the hope of changing the weather.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 13 Comments

His case is one of dozens around the U.S. to come under scrutiny because of entrenched but now-discredited beliefs about how arson can be detected. The Arson Research Project at the Monterey College of Law in California has highlighted at least 31 convictions based at least partly on debunked fire investigations, including that of a Texas man executed in 2004, and experts believe there are many more.
“There was just no science behind” the old assumptions about arson, said Paul Cates of The Innocence Project, a group that works to overturn wrongful convictions, primarily through the use of DNA. “A lot of this was just guesswork and voodoo.”

Flashback: The FBI’s Bullet Lead Analysis Used Flawed Science