John Allen Paulos wrote of innumeracy, the mild malady of being unable to work with numbers. “I’m not primarily concerned with esoteric mathematics here, only with some feel for numbers and probabilities, some ability to estimate answers to the ubiquitous questions… people should have a visceral reaction to the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion.”
So it is true. And undisputed.
The opposite of innumeracy isn’t numeracy or even mathematical ability. High-level mathematics will always be closed off to all but the few, not only because it requires innate abilities most don’t have in the same way most can’t be centers on professional football teams, but because it requires years of dedication and few have the time or inclination.
After quantifying the magnitude and frequency of extreme floods in the UK, scientists found that flooding has been the most extreme in more than 600 years.
Flooding in northwest England was reconstructed from the coarse grained units preserved in lake sediments at Bassenthwaite Lake. The record includes the floods of December 2015 (Storm Desmond) and November 2009.
The UK scientists found five flood rich periods (CE 1460-1500, 1580-1680, 1780-1820, 1850-1925, 1970-present) and then (of course) found a way to tie the floods to global warming.
However, reader J. H. Walker comes to a different conclusion.
That futuristic phrase from the science fiction television series Star Trek, with actor James Doohan as Scotty, was the command to instantly beam your physical being to another place in the universe like from one star to another or, for all other earthlings that want to stay close to the surface, like traveling from LA to the Big Apple in a fraction of a second.
Guess what? A kind of “teleportation,” described as ”long-distance ‘disembodied‘ transfer” is now claimed to have been achieved. The wonders of modern science keep getting weirder by the day. I can already see airline executives shaking in their boots, not to mention the Hyperloop and “Uber”outfits—already so yesteryear …
Key UK global warming spin machine The Guardian newspaper is at it again touting a new paper by discredited “soft” science experts. The “Big Story” here is the newly-published paper ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism’ (September 19, 2016) which takes long- discredited strawman alarmist talking points and runs them up a flag pole for treehuggers to salute.
The Guardian asserts the new paper debunks skeptics who use “contradictory arguments” as follows:
“A new research paper published in the journal Synthese has looked at several of these contradictory arguments that get thrown around the blogosphere, the Australian Senate and the opinion pages of the (mostly) conservative media.
The paper comes with the fun and enticing title: “The Alice in Wonderland mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism.”
Why Alice? Because, as the White Queen admitted: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The UK government is to outline its plans to strengthen collaborative research between Britain and China. The Science Minister, Jo Johnson, will give details while opening a joint UK-Chinese plant research centre just outside Shanghai.
Scientists at the centre will investigate new ways of growing crops to feed an expanding global population. The centre is the latest effort by the UK to tap into the rapid growth in scientific investment by China.
Chinese research has grown rapidly in the past 20 years. Spending on R&D is now over 40 times what it was in 1995, amounting to £150bn in 2015 – just over 2% of the country’s economic production (GDP).
That compares with the UK government’s spending on R&D of £8.4bn, which is just under 0.5% of Britain’s GDP.
Some years ago, my West Virginia hunting and fishing buddy was invited to appear on a local television station high in the mountains with an animal rights activist, a young vegan mother who brought her one-year-old daughter with her.
In the midst of the discussion after the young lady argued that we humans ought to stop treating animals as our inferiors, my friend turned to her and asked a simple question. “After the show, you will have to drive back down the mountain with your daughter and I’m wondering what you would do if, as you round a curve, you see a raccoon or rabbit in the road and you have a choice: You can hit and probably kill it or you can swerve and possibly lose control of your car endangering you and your child. What would you do?”
Scientists at Australia’s main medical research agency say that fluoride in drinking water is safe after analyzing 60 years of research and 3,000 scientific studies.
Researchers found that fluoride in water has no adverse health effects at the levels used in Australia, and that the substance is not linked to low IQ, cancer, or cognitive problems. The only result was reduction of the effects of tooth decay by 26 to 44 percent in children.
“It shows that community water fluoridation as it’s used in Australia today is effective at reducing tooth decay and is not associated with any general negative health effects,” Anne Kelso, CEO of Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, told reporters.
This is the ultimate fact sheet for debunking what has become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most potent regulatory weapon — the claim that fine particulate matter (soot and dust called PM2.5) in outdoor air kills people. This sheet will be updated regularly as needed. This will be Version 1 (September 22, 2016). Please let me know if you have comments/suggestions.
The Claim. Since the 1996, EPA has claimed that fine particulate matter in outdoor air (PM2.5) causes death.
The EPA’s position is that:
ANY inhalation of PM2.5 can cause death;
Death from PM2.5 may occur within hours of inhalation (i.e., “short-term” or literally “sudden death”) and that;
Long-term (i.e., years or decades) exposure to PM2.5 can cause premature death.
EPA claims that natural and manmade PM2.5 causes as many as 500,000 deaths annually. [1]
Abstract: Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science.
This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing—no deliberate cheating nor loafing—by scientists, only that publication is a principal factor for career advancement. Some normative methods of analysis have almost certainly been selected to further publication instead of discovery.
In order to improve the culture of science, a shift must be made away from correcting misunderstandings and towards rewarding understanding. We support this argument with empirical evidence and computational modelling. We first present a 60-year meta-analysis of statistical power in the behavioural sciences and show that power has not improved despite repeated demonstrations of the necessity of increasing power.
To demonstrate the logical consequences of structural incentives, we then present a dynamic model of scientific communities in which competing laboratories investigate novel or previously published hypotheses using culturally transmitted research methods. As in the real world, successful labs produce more ‘progeny,’ such that their methods are more often copied and their students are more likely to start labs of their own. Selection for high output leads to poorer methods and increasingly high false discovery rates. We additionally show that replication slows but does not stop the process of methodological deterioration. Improving the quality of research requires change at the institutional level.
The thermometer at Luanda is located next to the airport tarmac in the middle of very dense city of nearly three million people.
The “record heat” in southwest Africa is based on one tampered station, located next to a giant piece of asphalt in the middle of a rapidly growing city.
Luanda city has the highest rate of population growth in Africa, a local study shows. According to the study presented by the Sweden embassy in Angola, Luanda is set to have 9 million inhabitants by 2030.
Many surveys have named the city as the world’s most expensive. One the negative side, Luanda is ranked among the 25 dirtiest cities in the world.
Instead of reducing recent temperatures to compensate for UHI, NASA cooled past temperatures. If Gavin set out to commit fraud, what would he do differently?
Much of the hysteria over atmospheric CO2 arises from ignoring the past which provides the context for interpreting the present. Recently, one scientist suggested that climate researchers should be schooled in geology before commenting on climate change. Instead of that, of course, most of them are based in environmentalism. So as a public service this post presents some excellent and time-tested evidence produced by Dr Guy LeBlanc Smith. h/t Jeff Hayes
It’s a bit like being savaged by a sheep. Anthony Watts and his psychotic sidekick Willis the drug-addled cowboy are at it again. They’re trying to undermine the work of Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller, who gave an excellent presentation at our highly successful London Conference. Their theory covers the underlying physical principles which determine surface temperature across a range of solar system bodies with radically different parameters in terms of insolation, surface pressure, atmospheric composition and rotation rates. There’s not a snowball in hell’s chance of Watts or Willis understanding it, as they amply demonstrated last time they had a go.
We create crude global wind pattern maps (Figure 1). The problem is they are theoretical and based on a false premise known as the three cell global circulation pattern.
Figure 1
The empirical evidence does not support the three cell system, yet, like the greenhouse analogy, it still appears in most textbooks. Figure 2 is from NOAA’s “Fun for kids” current website.
What effectively disappeared in the better approximation, or at best is a seasonal phenomenon, is the Ferrel Cell. The diagram indicates its transitory nature by labelling it the “indirect” Ferrel Cell. Again the diagram shows average conditions for both Hemispheres, but there is a considerable difference between them because of the different land water configurations.
I provide a proof that alternative energy production technologies (wind, solar, ocean energy, biofuels, etc.) necessarily burn more fossil fuel, per quantum of energy generated, than the energy production technologies that directly burn fossil fuel.
(Note: Hydro-electricity is “renewable” but it is not an “alternative” energy.)
If this were not the case, or if there was a realistic potential for this not to be the case, then alternatives could be more economical on a true-coast basis and would be experiencing a consequential surge in development and implementation, without disproportionate (per energy quantum) public investment.
Whereas, the global reality looks like this:
(toe = Ton of Oil Equivalent)
The increases in the insignificant alternatives are tied to disproportionate government investment, incentives, and subsidies, which transfer artificially high costs to citizens and users. As soon as government commitments are reduced or terminated the sector crashes [1].
Coastlines are actually gaining in size in a warming world, confounding climate change claims they would shrink as sea levels rise.
A new study by the Dutch Deltares Research Institute shows the Earth is actually gaining more land than it’s losing, disputing claims that #Climate Change is causing increased sea level rise. The study showed our planet actually gained 107,000 square miles over the past three decades, including 21,000 square miles of coastline. That means continents are gaining in size, and not shrinking.
Conversely, the study showed the Earth had only lost 71,000 square miles of land during this same time period, including 12,500 square miles of shoreline. Some scientists have held that in a warming world, the coastlines would be the first casualties as melting ice sheets poured excess water into the oceans. Even President-Elect #Obama said in 2008 that his winning the election meant the rise of the oceans would now begin to slow. Turns out the oceans didn’t need his help after all.
