Michael Hart is a former official in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and now emeritus professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he has taught courses on the laws and institutions of international trade, Canadian foreign policy, and the politics of climate change. He held the Fulbright-Woodrow Wilson Center Visiting Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations and was Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service, Senior Fellow at American University in Washington, and is the founder and director emeritus of Carleton University’s Centre for Trade Policy and Law. In addition, he has taught courses in several other countries. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than a dozen books and several hundred articles.
Celebrity physicist Brian Cox misled the ABC TV Q&A audience on at least 3 points-of-fact on Monday night. This is typical of the direction that much of science is taking. Richard Horton, the current editor of the medical journal, The Lancet, recently stated that, “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
Firstly, Cox displayed an out-of-date NASA chart of remodelled global temperatures as proof that we have catastrophic climate change caused by industrial pollution. Another panellist on the program, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, tried to raise the issue of cause and effect: querying whether there really was a link between rising temperature and carbon dioxide. This is generally accepted without question. But interestingly – beyond experiments undertaken by a chemist over 100 years ago – there is no real proof beyond unreliable computer simulation models.
NASA scientist Peter Schultz in the “Science” program titled “Stellar Gold Rush” (March 30, 2016) showed why science is never settled and why observed phenomena still baffles us. Schultz and other NASA scientists have long been at a loss to explain an odd electrical glow over earth’s moon.
This mystery was first reported in 1978 television program about the Surveyor 7 space mission. Shultz had become fascinated about a report of “Moon Glow” that could not be explained. At the time of the event Dr. Bill Barnes, author of “Space Wars” had said: “There’s a light that’s overhead that shouldn’t be there.”
It is hard to imagine now, but Britain once led the nuclear revolution. Ernest Rutherford first broke the nuclei of atoms at Manchester University in 1917. Our Queen opened the world’s first nuclear power plant in 1956 at Calder Hall.
Such were the halcyon days of British atomic confidence, before defeatism took hold and free market ideology was pushed to pedantic extremes.
Most of Britain’s ageing reactors will be phased out over the next decade, leaving a gaping hole in electricity supply. By historic irony the country has drifted into a position where it now depends on anailing state-owned French company to build its two reactors at Hinkley Point, with help from the Chinese Communist Party.
In my book, The Honest Broker, I describe four modes of engagement by scientists and other experts. They are ideal types and shown in the figure above. The different modes are a function of how we think about democracy and how we think about the proper role of science in society. The book gets into some more detail, of course, on the theoretical background. Here I respond to a few recent requests to provide a high level overview of the different roles, motivated by a workshop I attended last week at the National Academy of Sciences organized by their roundtable on Public Interfaces of the Life Sciences — on Twitter #NASinterface. I also list some thoughts based on my experiences engaging experts on these roles over the past several years.
Thin clouds at about 5 km altitude are more ubiquitous in the tropics than previously thought and they have a substantial cooling effect on climate. This is shown in a recent study by researchers from Stockholm University and the University of Miami published in Nature Communications. The cooling effect of mid-level clouds is currently missing in global climate models.
NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt, who has come under fire for being more activist than scientist, sent out a tweet yesterday predicting that 2016 would be the hottest year on record and said he was 99 percent sure of that claim. According to land-and-sea-based temperature stations, July 2016 was 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1950 to 1980 timeframe. But when compared to the 1930s, July still is not a record breaker. But only if you don’t rely on an adjusted temperature dataset.
Schmidt, a director for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), is disseminating a chart on Twitter from a dataset that has been heavily adjusted to show a much larger warming trend than is actually occurring.
Celebrity British television scientist, Brian Cox, is exposed promoting fraudulent NASA temperature graph to a live Australian audience. In an attempt to discredit fellow panellist Aussie climate skeptic, Malcolm Roberts, Cox waved his dodgy piece of paper boldly declaring “I’ve brought the graph” (see photo) to a hand-picked audience.
But after the show informed critics were quick to back the skeptic speaker who cut through Cox’s flim-flam to pinpoint precisely the fakery on display.
One of my students—my heart soars like a hawk!—sent me the video linked below. I’ll assume you’ve watched it, as my comments make reference to it.
About the dismal effects of p-values, the video already does a bust-up job. Plus, we’re sick of talking about them, so we won’t. I’ll only mention that the same kinds of mistakes are made using Bayes factors; only BFs aren’t used by most researchers, so few see them.
While oxygen first appeared in Earth’s atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, it took another two billion years to reach the levels we breath in today.
Now a researchers believe they have identified what helped lead to this dramatic increase in oxygen on our planet – moss.
Scientists at the University of Exeter suggest moss-like plants were among the first to colonise the land and triggered oxygen in the atmosphere to increase.
Their Research: I had truly forgotten just how much work Mr. Watts had done in helping prove the Slayer’s position that there is no greenhouse effect. The following 3 articles are all tied together but the 2nd article is where Anthony and a friend of his actually did some experimentation which ended up totally supporting the Slayers position that there is no greenhouse effect as depicted in climate alarm science:
The UK government has confirmed that funding for science and technology research will not be affected by the country’s decision to leave the European Union, promising that EU-agreed funding will continue even after Brexit is finalised.
Some of the facilities that will benefit include the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre in Manchester, the Thames Valley Science Park and Cornwall’s Carluddon Technology Park.
Chancellor Philip Hammond said: “Structural and investment funds projects signed before the Autumn Statement, and Horizon research funding granted before we leave the EU, will be guaranteed by the Treasury after we leave.”
Climate boffins believe the UK’s topsy-turvy climate is in for a chilly twist within the next few years as three major forms of climate change trigger “substantial cooling”. Drastic changes in ocean conditions, greenhouse gases and a weakening of the sun threaten increasingly worsening winters of blistering blizzards and severe snowstorms for years to come. Another major factor in the predicted cool down could be the switch from an usually strong El Nino to a La Nina weather front in the pacific ocean. Meteorologist for AccuWeather Tyler Roys told Daily Star Online La Nina could contribute to the chilly mix. The Met Office said the onset of La Nina from 2017 is likely to “buck the trend” in terms of record-breaking global temperature averages, predicting a cool down across the globe. –Joshua Nevett, Daily Star, 14 August 2016
The conceptualization of “global warming” has become so entrenched in the lexicon that few give much thought to its dubious derivation.
Many assume that “global warming” actually means that all or nearly all of the globe is warming as a consequence of the “well-mixed” greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (i.e., CO2 concentrations have indeed reached right about 400 parts per million from the Arctic to Antarctica, or all across the globe). In reality, however, only parts of the globe have been warming. Large regions of the Earth have seen stable or falling temperatures in recent decades, or even dating back to the mid-20th century, when anthropogenic emissions have been claimed to have caused most climate changes.
Science can make us uncomfortable. Astronomy proved that the Earth goes around the sun, upending centuries of geocentric theology. Physics tells us that our universe will someday come to an end. DNA sequencing can reveal our true ancestry or genetic predispositions to cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, forever changing our life’s trajectory.
As unsettling as those discoveries have been for society, some research is so politically controversial that few dare to speak of it in public for fear of running afoul of the PC police. And this fear, argues Nathan Cofnas in the journal Foundations of Science, obstructs the self-correcting nature of scientific inquiry.
Mr. Cofnas begins the paper with the story of Socrates, who was executed for “corrupting the youth” of Greece. Forebodingly, he adds, “[T]he philosophy of his prosecutors — that morality-threatening scientific investigation should be prohibited — flourishes even today.”
To support his case, Mr. Cofnas focuses on the taboo subject of group differences in intelligence, which he says is suppressed by those who believe that even discussing the topic is “morally wrong or morally dangerous.”
Those who embrace such a viewpoint obviously do so with the honorable intention of preventing discrimination. However, the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions. Such misguided efforts to maintain perfect equality can hamper the advancement of knowledge. Mr. Cofnas states:
“[W]hen hypotheses are regarded as supporting certain moral values or desirable political goals, scientists often refuse to abandon them in the light of empirical evidence.”
Is he right? Absolutely, yes.
Not only do intellectuals refuse to abandon politically correct beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, but simply questioning them can ruin a person’s career. Lawrence Summers’ tenure as president of Harvard was cut short because he suggested that there are intellectual differences between men and women. As a result of such punitive pushback, some researchers are afraid to investigate differences between male and female brains, which certainly exist. Without a doubt, this reticence is holding back the field of neuroscience.
A similar chilling effect can be seen in climatology. The only politically correct belief regarding the climate is that humans are 100{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} responsible for everything bad that happens and that the Four Horsemen are already marching toward Earth. Questioning that apocalyptic and unscientific belief has resulted in multiple researchers being labeled “climate deniers.” Climatology would greatly benefit from the more skeptical approach of so-called “lukewarmers,” but far too many are ostracized and demonized.
Discussions about the causes of homelessness also fall under the purview of the PC police. The politically correct explanation is that homelessness is the result of poverty. While obviously a factor, often left out of the debate is the fact that, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 20{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} to 25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of homeless people are severely mentally ill, a prevalence that is roughly four times that of the general population. The same group estimates that 38{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} and 26{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of homeless people are dependent on alcohol and drugs, respectively. In fact, NCH states that, “Substance abuse [is] the single largest cause of homelessness for single adults.”
Certainly, many — perhaps most — people prefer to ignore reality in favor of feel-good fallacies. Mr. Cofnas believes this phenomenon is rooted in a “deep human impulse to conflate facts and moral values.” In other words, (positive) statements that describe the world as it is are often interpreted by people as (normative) statements that prescribe the world as it ought to be.
This fundamental confusion distorts debate and impedes progress. If Mr. Cofnas is correct that this cognitive dissonance is hardwired into us, then that makes the goal of evidence-based policy sadly unattainable.
Source: Nathan Cofnas. “Science Is Not Always ‘Self-Correcting’: Fact–Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence.” Found Sci 21: 477. Published online: 1-Feb-2015. DOI: 10.1007/s10699-015-9421-3
Universities UK has today responded to the announcement by the Chancellor regarding EU funding guaranteed beyond the date the UK leaves the EU.
Alistair Jarvis, Deputy Chief Executive of Universities UK said: “This is encouraging news that provides much needed stability for British universities during the transition period as the UK exits the EU and provides an important signal to European researchers that they can continue to collaborate with their UK colleagues as they have before.”
“Horizon 2020 research funding supports British researchers to collaborate with international partners to deliver cutting-edge research that benefits the economy, society and British people.”
“We hope that the Government will now move quickly to address the uncertainty amongst EU students considering applying to British universities by confirming that those beginning courses before we exit the EU will be subject to current fees levels and financial support arrangements for the duration of their course.”
Richard Horton, the current editor of the medical journal, The Lancet, recently stated that, “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
This is shown in a recent study by researchers from Stockholm University and the University of Miami published in Nature Communications. The cooling effect of mid-level clouds is currently missing in global climate models.
The following 3 articles are all tied together but the 2nd article is where Anthony and a friend of his actually did some experimentation which ended up totally supporting the Slayers position that there is no greenhouse effect as depicted in climate alarm science:
Another major factor in the predicted cool down could be the switch from an usually strong El Nino to a La Nina weather front in the pacific ocean. Meteorologist for AccuWeather Tyler Roys told Daily Star Online La Nina could contribute to the chilly mix. The Met Office said the onset of La Nina from 2017 is likely to “buck the trend” in terms of record-breaking global temperature averages, predicting a cool down across the globe. –Joshua Nevett, 
