Category: Unsettled Science

The Sound Of Settled Science

Radioactive Unsettled Science 30 Comments

The Nuclear Theory You Never Knew Was Nonsense

In 2018, I was asked to submit a paper and make a presentation on the fraud of LNT to a joint meeting of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) and the Health Physics Society (HPS) on low-level radiation hazards and risk management. I was asked because the organizers of the meeting knew that I was critical of LNT radiation biophysics — I thought it was a crock.

LNT says there is no safe level of radiation exposure, but obviously, the better rule is the rule of Paracelsus: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes that a thing is no poison.” (The dose makes the poison.) No threshold of LNT throws that maxim out the window.

My negative attitude about LNT was nurtured by a twenty-plus-year interest in the work of Ed Calabrese, U. Mass Amherst, reigning expert on low-level radiation hazards and the theory of heresies that asserts a tri-phasic effect of exposure of all kinds — 1) a no effect level, 2) a beneficial effect at low exposure levels, and 3) a toxic effect at higher levels of exposure. My medical experience with drug effects shows that same hermetic diphasic effect — drugs have a sweet spot between no effect and toxic effect.

h/t PG

In The Mail

Science Unsettled Science 4 Comments

Susan Crockford has a new book out.

Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise  published by Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford (paperback/ebook) explains everything about the origin of polar bears: not just when and where the species arose, but exactly how it happened! No other book like this exists. Despite decades of serving as an icon for the catastrophic climate change narrative, the polar bear has never had its evolutionary history explained so completely, never mind in a fully-referenced, plain-language style. This comprehensive look at polar bear evolution provides critical insight into why we should expect Ursus maritimus to survive, even if the climate gets warmer than it is now.

Check it out.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Safe and Effective Science Unsettled Science 68 Comments

The Illusion of Consensus

The project of science calls for rigor, humility, and open discussion. The pandemic has revealed the stunning magnitude of the political and institutional capture of science. For this reason, both of us — Rav and Jay — are launching a podcast devoted to investigating the concoction of pseudo-consensus in science and its ramifications for our society. To start — and for quite some time — they will be examining the illusory consensus during COVID. However they will soon branch out into issues pertaining to transgender care, mental health, psychiatry, and nutrition — topics that have been wholly corrupted with one monolithic consensus that has proven to bear many costs on our society.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science War On Meat 39 Comments

Dispatches from the war on meat;

In a new, unprecedented effort, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, formulating a new rating system to communicate health risks in the process. Their findings mostly dispel any concerns about eating red meat.

“We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke,” they summarized.

The IHME scientists had been observing the shoddy nature of health science for decades. Each year, hundreds of frankly lazy studies are published that simply attempt to find an observational link between some action — eating a food for example — and a health outcome, like death or disease. In the end, owing to sloppy methods, varying subject populations, and inconsistent statistical measures, everything, especially different foods, seems to be both associated and not associated with cancer. How is the lay public supposed to interpret this mess?

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 25 Comments

Via Phantom Soapbox: Speed of light violated, spooky action at a distance confirmed

Albert Einstein was famously uneasy with some of the consequences of quantum entanglement. If quantum mechanics were right, then a pair of entangled objects would behave as a single quantum system no matter how far apart the objects were. Altering the state of one of them should instantly alter the state of the second, with the change seemingly occurring faster than light could possibly travel between the two objects. This, Einstein argued, almost certainly had to be wrong.

Y2Kyoto: A Tip From An IPCC Insider

Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 13 Comments

Roger Pielke Jr;

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

Safe and Effective Science Unsettled Science 12 Comments

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

Climate Cult Unsettled Science 15 Comments

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…

Y2Kyoto: Hide The Decline

Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 32 Comments

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

Let Them Eat Taser Unsettled Science 16 Comments

el gato malo;

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.

Kiss it better!

Let Them Eat Taser Protected Class Safe and Effective Unsettled Science 47 Comments

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

Let Them Eat Taser Unsettled Science Wuhan Flu 24 Comments

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?

Science Unsettled Science 8 Comments

Science;

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

Unsettled Science 59 Comments

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.”

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation