A high level participant in the IPCC (purposely vague to protect their identity) has confirmed to me that the major error on tropical cyclones that I recently identified was (a) indeed a major snafu and (b) a result of claims being inserted into the IPCC outside its review process. Neither of these things should happen in an process that the IPCC promotes as the “gold standard” of scientific assessment.
The error was to claim that a change in the proportion of Category 3-5 tropical cyclones has been detected and attributed to human-caused climate change, which is contrary to both evidence and the scientific literature. Even worse, in making the false claims the IPCC confused a study of measurements of tropical cyclones with tropical cyclones, and failed to acknowledge that paper had undergone a major correction, which altered its conclusions and rendered it irrelevant.
The false claim was not caught and was ultimately elevated by the IPCC to the summary of its recent Synthesis Report where it was promoted as one of the most significant scientific findings of the past assessment cycle. You can read all of the details on the error in this post and its follow up.
The tip that I received prompted me to go back and look carefully at the evolution of the drafting IPCC AR6, which was where the mistake made. I can confirm that the tip checks out. The IPCC failed to follow its own procedures of quality control and peer review. False information made its way into the report outside of the review process and was repeatedly elevated to the highest levels of information conveyed to policy makers.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Joe Rogan & Dave Smith on the Illusion of Scientific Consensus
"It's not that there's consensus amongst the scientists. It's that any scientist that doesn't agree with the consensus gets kicked out. They all get excommunicated and silenced. And then it's just this completely… pic.twitter.com/mNblPe6MsM
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) April 28, 2023
Related: Now it turns out Canadian health officials knew ahead of time that the COVID-19 vaccinated likely carried the same viral load as the unvaccinated.
The Sound Of Settled Science
The science behind the claims that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas is pretty straightforward, if you look at only part of the science. Methane indeed traps more heat inside the atmosphere than CO2, by a wide margin. It disperses much more quickly, with a short life in the atmosphere, but if you only consider the warming impact it indeed is quite powerful.
That’s the reasoning behind the war on gas. But…
The Sound Of Settled Science
How did the Rocky Mountains Form? (1 hr)
Y2Kyoto: Hide The Decline
Yet again, the National Post buries the news in the financial section;
… their findings “have strong implications for trends in climate model simulations and other observations” because the atmosphere has warmed at half the average rate predicted by climate models over the same period. They also note that their findings are “consistent with conclusions in McKitrick and Christy (2020),” namely that climate models have a pervasive global warming bias. In other research, Christy and mathematician Richard McNider have shown that the satellite warming rate implies the climate system can only be half as sensitive to GHGs as the average model used by the IPCC for projecting future warming.
The Sound Of Settled Science
i have long been fascinated by the manner in which so much of what we “know” simply “isn’t so.” grand myths and misperceptions proliferate through our culture, our models of the world, and even in our scientific understandings. someone does a bad study, makes some wild claims, and decades go down the tubes as whole fields get led astray into rabbit warrens and the consciousness and belief set of the populace gets wedded to some form of compelling crackpottery or other.
there’s always “data.”
there’s always a loud proclamation.
and because it’s some simple seemingly telling claim, everyone jumps on board. mostly, they want to. people love stuff like this. they love “big, simple facts.”
but a shocking amount of it is just plain bunk generated by slanted study. this is sometimes unwitting, sometimes deliberate, but the effect is always the same:
you get told a big simple fact that is just plain wrong.
Eco-Loon Madness Coming Soon to North American Communities?
With social media, bad ideas & even worse behaviour can easily cross oceans at lightning speed.
Kiss it better!
Throughout most of the pandemic, were not treatments like this considered to be the province of lunatic fringe, tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists? Note that the article validates direct clinical experience in this case as opposed to the usual kneejerk condemnation of any treatment that does not take the triple somersault double blind study route. How times have changed.
One can now imagine how much easier Covid could have been to manage if the medical central planners and their media lackeys had promoted the use of disinfectant nasal rinses instead of insisting that, short of vaccination and Tylenol, there was absolutely no treatment whatsoever for Covid.
The company McGhee called was Vancouver-based Ondine Biomedical, which created Steriwave, a technology that involves putting a disinfecting liquid into the nose and then activating it with lights attached to probes to kill viruses lurking in the respiratory system.
Interesting juxtaposition when you look at some past comments from the front man of Kiss. One must, presumably, only engage in the treatments that earn his approval.
Let Them Eat Taser
Published this month in the Journal Of Virtue Signaling;
We now have the most authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero. The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses.
This verdict ought to be the death knell for mask mandates, but that would require the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the rest of the public health establishment to forsake “the science”—and unfortunately, these leaders and their acolytes in the media seem as determined as ever to ignore actual science.
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
Nearly a decade ago, headlines highlighted a disturbing trend in science: The number of articles retracted by journals had increased 10-fold during the previous 10 years. Fraud accounted for some 60% of those retractions; one offender, anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt, had racked up almost 90 retractions after investigators concluded he had fabricated data and committed other ethical violations. Boldt may have even harmed patients by encouraging the adoption of an unproven surgical treatment. Science, it seemed, faced a mushrooming crisis.[…]
That list, formally released to the public this week as a searchable database, is now the largest and most comprehensive of its kind. It includes more than 18,000 retracted papers and conference abstracts dating back to the 1970s (and even one paper from 1756 involving Benjamin Franklin). It is not a perfect window into the world of retractions. Not all publishers, for instance, publicize or clearly label papers they have retracted, or explain why they did so. And determining which author is responsible for a paper’s fatal flaws can be difficult.
Still, the data trove has enabled Science, working with Retraction Watch, to gain unusual insight into one of scientific publishing’s most consequential but shrouded practices. Our analysis of about 10,500 retracted journal articles shows the number of retractions has continued to grow, but it also challenges some worrying perceptions that continue today. The rise of retractions seems to reflect not so much an epidemic of fraud as a community trying to police itself.
The Sound Of Settled Science
They’ll cling to the Big Bang until their fingernails bleed.
Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the Big Bang, suggesting the early universe may have had a stellar fast-track that produced these “monsters.”
While the new James Webb Space Telescope has spotted even older galaxies, dating to within a mere 300 million years of the beginning of the universe, it’s the size and maturity of these six apparent mega-galaxies that stun scientists. They reported their findings Wednesday.
Lead researcher Ivo Labbe of Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology and his team expected to find little baby galaxies this close to the dawn of the universe — not these whoppers.
“While most galaxies in this era are still small and only gradually growing larger over time,” he said in an email, “there are a few monsters that fast-track to maturity. Why this is the case or how this would work is unknown.” […]
“The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” Leja said in a statement. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
The models said otherwise, and the models are never wrong.
When a kilonova was detected at 140 million light-years away in 2017, it was the first time scientists could gather detailed data. Scientists around the world are still interpreting the data from this colossal explosion, including Albert Sneppen and Darach Watson from the University of Copenhagen, who made a surprising discovery.
“You have two super-compact stars that orbit each other 100 times a second before collapsing. Our intuition, and all previous models, say that the explosion cloud created by the collision must have a flattened and rather asymmetrical shape,” says Albert Sneppen, PhD student at the Niels Bohr Institute and first author of the study published in the journal Nature.
This is why he and his research colleagues are surprised to find that this is not the case at all for the kilonova from 2017. It is completely symmetrical and has a shape close to a perfect sphere.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Quest for First People: Luther Cressman led a lifelong search for America’s first people in Oregon’s Great Basin. (1hr)
A voice of sanity
John Campbell has been one of my “go-to” sources when it comes to information about Covid, and this interview covers a lot of topics in one convenient go. Neil Oliver engages Dr. Campbell in a discussion of his background and career and then delves into various aspects of Covid and pandemic policy.
Campbell is no conspiracy theorist, but approaches the topic of Covid by recognizing that there are degrees of evidence when it comes to analyzing the effectiveness and safety of various treatments. There is an unfortunate tendency, for instance, to treat the topic of adverse vaccine reactions as if the evidence is utterly conclusive (rare and always treatable) and we can simply close down the discussion. The same goes for Ivermectin and excess deaths, which are discussed in this interview.
Interesting to note that Campbell is no longer certain that, if he knew back then what he knows now about the vaccines, he would be inclined to take the shot.
Update: Robert here. I hope my SDA colleague, Dennis, doesn’t mind but this video directly from John Campbell, is directly related.
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Polar Ice Caps
Record #cold in Antarctica on January 29. With a Tmin of -48.7°C, the Russian station of Vostok (3,420 m) broke its monthly record!
The Sound Of Settled Science
Everything keeps getting older.
Archaeologists excavating at the Simbiro III archaeological site have found a trove obsidian hand-axes from 1.2 million years ago, indicating that hand axe production on a mass scale occurred 500,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Simple obsidian tool production has been documented from sites as early as 3.3 million years ago, but the complexity for mass tool production of hand axes by an unknown group of hominins at Simbiro III, predates the earliest known example found at Kariandusi in Kenya which dates to 700,000-years-ago.
The results of the study at Simbiro III have been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, where the researchers document almost 600 obsidian hand-axes being discovered.
Abstract here: A surge in obsidian exploitation more than 1.2 million years ago at Simbiro III
Scott Adams, “Anti-Vaxxers Were Totally Right”
There are highly edited versions of this floating around the internet this morning. Including an edited version put out by Adams himself. But its well worth watching the whole thing to really get the context and what Adams is thinking.
I don’t completely agree with Adams that his process was largely correct but he got the wrong answer. A lot of people were comparing the wrong things when they decided to get the shots. That was a big part of the propaganda campaign. But kudos to Adams for going public with this. Far more people need to follow his example.
The Sound Of Settled Science
A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease;
In August 2021, Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom of possible scientific misconduct. A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease called Simufilam. The drug’s developer, Cassava Sciences, claimed it improved cognition, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid beta (Aβ), a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. The attorney’s clients—two prominent neuroscientists who are also short sellers who profit if the company’s stock falls—believed some research related to Simufilam may have been “fraudulent,” according to a petition later filed on their behalf with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Schrag, 37, a softspoken, nonchalantly rumpled junior professor, had already gained some notoriety by publicly criticizing the controversial FDA approval of the anti-Aβ drug Aduhelm. His own research also contradicted some of Cassava’s claims. He feared volunteers in ongoing Simufilam trials faced risks of side effects with no chance of benefit.
So he applied his technical and medical knowledge to interrogate published images about the drug and its underlying science—for which the attorney paid him $18,000. He identified apparently altered or duplicated images in dozens of journal articles. The attorney reported many of the discoveries in the FDA petition, and Schrag sent all of them to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had invested tens of millions of dollars in the work. […]
But Schrag’s sleuthing drew him into a different episode of possible misconduct, leading to findings that threaten one of the most cited Alzheimer’s studies of this century and numerous related experiments. Continue reading
An Expert Has Enough Humility to Accept New Facts
Soon after Dennis added his Spot the Fallacies post, this discussion between Dr. Aseem Malhotra and Bret Weinstein appeared in my YouTube feed. It’s long but if you just listen to the first 15 minutes, you’ll learn that Malhotra is a true scientist and not a political technocrat who is willfully blind.