Category: Unsettled Science

What Would We Do Without Models?

Unsettled Science 19 Comments

Morning update: Scenes of significant damage are beginning to come in.

Morning devastation.

If you’re anywhere near Acapulco, take cover.

In a shocking turn of events, Hurricane #Otis in the Eastern Pacific has unexpectedly, explosively intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane in just 12 hours.

Even worse, the storm is expected to make a catastrophic landfall tonight as a Category 5 hurricane near Acapulco, Mexico, home to 1 million people.

Only 18 hours ago, people were expecting a tropical storm at landfall, and now a devastating Category 5 storm is likely.

This is pretty much a worst-case scenario, as residents have little time to find a safe shelter and protect life and property from this life-threatening storm.

A major hurricane (Category 3+) has never made landfall within 50 miles of Acapulco, let alone a Category 5 hurricane.

Otis could become the first Eastern Pacific hurricane ever recorded to make landfall as a Category 5 in Mexico.

Anyone in or near Acapulco should rush storm preparations to completion as their is little time left to shelter from #Otis.

Ryan Maue – “Nightmare scenario” for coastal Mexico…

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 30 Comments

How Could the IPCC Make an Error this Large?

Earlier this week I discussed the mystifying continued prioritization of the outdated and implausible RCP8.5 scenario by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in its scenarios expected to guide Dutch climate policies for the next decade. Since then I have heard from many friends and colleagues in the Netherlands offering a wide range of perspectives on what happened and what should happen next.

These exchanges have prompted me to summarize how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has treated climate scenarios in its most recent assessment reports. Today I document a major error made by the IPCC in its fifth assessment report (AR5) which has had profound consequences for climate research and policy in the decade since.

Settle in, this one is a doozy.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 24 Comments

Roger Pielke Jr;

In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising: [A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.

The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.

Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom…

The Sound Of Settled Science

climategate Unsettled Science 38 Comments

Daily Mail;

A climate change scientist has claimed the world’s leading academic journals reject papers which don’t ‘support certain narratives’ about the issue and instead favor ‘distorted’ research which hypes up dangers rather than solutions.

Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, said editors at Nature and Science – two of the most prestigious scientific journals – select ‘climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives’.

In an article for The Free Press, Brown likened the approach to the way ‘the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause’ of wildfires, including the recent devastating fires in Hawaii. He pointed out research that said 80 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans.

Brown gave the example of a paper he recently authored titled ‘Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California’. Brown said the paper, published in Nature last week, ‘focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior’ and ignored other key factors.

Brown laid out his claims in an article titled ‘I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published‘. ‘I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work,’ the article begins.

Good for him.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Science Unsettled Science 143 Comments

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.

Launched at the end of 2021 as a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb, a tool with unmatched powers of observation, is on an exciting mission to look back in time, in effect, at the first stars and galaxies. But one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.

According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.

The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

Y2Kyoto: The Science Police

Climate Cult Green Police Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 12 Comments

Roger Pielke Jr

This post is inspired by the successful efforts last week of climate activists — including three widely-cited scientists — to enforce misinformation by the legacy media. In a nutshell, ABC News wrote an accurate story about how climate was not a major or even significant factor in the Lahaina, Maui fire and disaster. After being mobbed by the enforcers, the story was changed to emphasize the role of climate. These sort of activist scientists who seek to enforce preferred public narratives have been called the “science police.”

Today’s post pushes back against this narrative enforcement with some actual science. Have a look at the panel below. It shows three versions of a climate time series for annual counts of North Atlantic major hurricanes from 1995 to 2050. Two of the graphs include a large change in climate, one of them does not.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 28 Comments

Everything keeps getting older.

Archaeologists have new evidence suggesting that humans occupied Oregon more than 18,000 years ago. This makes it one of the oldest known sites of human occupation in North America.

A 2023 radiocarbon dating analysis was made based on findings at the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter near Burns, Oregon. The University of Oregon Archaeological Field School has been excavating at the site, which features a shallow overhang in an otherwise open environment. The field school has been working in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management since 2011.

Archaeologists have been studying how and when people migrated to the Americas for over a century. While researchers used to assume that no humans were on the continent until about 13,000 years ago — when they walked over the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age — both genetic and archaeological evidence have been pushing that date back further and further. However, these dates have spurred controversy.

The time has come to have a conversation on a name change. (link fixed)

What Would We Do Without Experts?

Quackery Unsettled Science 48 Comments

Experts and the Power of Self-Deception

Experts are ordinary human beings, with all the fallibilities that come with membership in our species. Like everyone else, experts sometimes suppress truth and disseminate falsehoods for self-preservation or personal gain. Sometimes, they do so in service to some larger cause. Experts, short on time or resources, may cut corners, publishing information they hope is correct, while knowing it may not be. In all these situations, the expert knows his or her information is or may be false.

More interesting, more likely, and more dangerous are those situations where the expert sincerely believes his or her falsehoods to be correct, owing to the lure of self-deception.

Another good essay by Robert F. Graboyes, who is generous with his free content. Pour a coffee and consider subscribing to his always excellent substack.

Y2Kyoto: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai

Climate Cult Unsettled Science Y2Kyoto 47 Comments

Thomas Lifson;

The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations. It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year-and-a-half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.

So, why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically? Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I – probably along with you — had never heard of. The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific. Don’t take it from me, take it from NASA …

h/t Robert L

What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

climategate2 Science Unsettled Science 14 Comments

Roger Pielke Jr: A whistleblower shares shocking details of corruption of peer review in climate science

I have been contacted by a whistleblower with a remarkable story of corruption of the academic peer-review process involving a paper published in 2022. The whistleblower has provided me with relevant emails, reviews and internal deliberations from which I recount this disturbing episode — which ends with an unwarranted and politically-motivated retraction of a paper that some climate scientists happened to disagree with.

The paper at the center of this story is not particularly significant, as it mainly reviews the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on trends in weather extremes. The paper does venture a bit too far (in my view) into commentary, but that is neither unique nor a basis for retracting a paper – if it were we’d have a lot of retractions!

To be clear, there is absolutely no allegation of research fraud or misconduct here, just simple disagreement. Instead of countering arguments and evidence via the peer reviewed literature, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher – Springer Nature, perhaps the world’s most important scientific publisher – to retract a paper. Sadly, the pressure campaign worked.

The abuse of the peer review process documented here is remarkable and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicized as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open and behind the scenes.

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.

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