The first plank of Principia Scientific International’s mission statement is to be the leading independent voice for principled science as per the Traditional Scientific Method (TSM) and associated ideas of Popper.  Hence, the question asked by the title.  Or, what are the associated ideas of Popper bringing to the table?  Or?  As I wrote John O’Sullivan, I am confused. 

The name of Principia Scientific International (PSI) must be associated with Isaac Newton’s classic book—The Principia.  So more specifically:  Why were not Newton’s four Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy not sufficient to define the traditional scientific method that was borne of the Age of Enlightenment and that gave rise to the technological advances of the industrial revolution?  Only the founders of PSI, who wrote its mission statement, can answer these questions.

The bad science, relative to the good traditional science, PSI terms “Post-normalism which is defined as a pre-deterministic approach where policy and outcome dictate the kind of ‘science’ needed to justify it. Perceived as the most culpable purveyors of this modern malaise are national governments, NGO’s and big corporations.”  At first I agreed with this diagnosis of the problem.  But I now consider it misses the central point.  It is human ‘nature’ that once one has claimed ownership of an idea, it is tough to give it up because to give it up is to admit that I was wrong.  People do not ‘naturally’ want their ideas challenged.

A semantic confusion is clouding one of the most talked-about issues in research. Scientists agree that there is a crisis in reproducibility, but they can’t agree on what ‘reproducibility’ means.

The muddle is hampering communication about the problem and efforts to address it, a meeting last week on improving the reproducibility of preclinical research was told.

Most scientists — at least, those in biomedical research — have the idea that reproducible findings are those that give generally consistent results across slight variations in experimental set-up, says Ferric Fang, a microbiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Reproduction is taking the idea of a scientific project and showing that it is robust enough to survive various sorts of analysis,” he says. That is, that it supports an expectation, for example that ‘reproducible’ preclinical results are those worth taking forward to clinical trials.

Schneefan at his site here writes about the unusually wet weather Europe has been experiencing lately. This has to be upsetting to global climate modelers and scientists, who years ago claimed Europe would have to expect hot, dry summers involving severe periods of droughts.

That prediction has turned out to be totally wrong. The very opposite has in fact occurred.

The reason for the recent wet conditions are likely in part due to the post (natural) ENSO activity of the past months, which have disrupted weather patterns, Schneefan suspects.

On global temperature we see the clear impacts of the oceanic ENSO. Schneefan writes the following at his site:

“The regional development in Europe is affected by the rash global cooling following the El Niño peak in global temperatures in February 2016.

The rash cooling is also continuing in June 2016 and will lead to further high precipitation in places like Australia.

Welcome to FP Comment’s 18^th annual Junk Science Week, dedicated to exposing the scientists, NGOs, activists, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who manipulate science data to achieve their objectives. Our standard definition over the years has been this: junk science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risk is exaggerated and the science adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.

Much of our content over the past 18 years has focused less on science itself and more on the NGOs, politicians and others who have found it convenient to use and abuse science as a springboard to political action. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to follow the empty-headed foibles of a media culture that mindlessly recycles reports that bacon may cause heart disease or that cell phones cause cancer. Less easy is dealing with the much bigger problem: the break down of science itself. In The Guardian last week, Jerome Ravetz, considered one of the world’s leading philosophers of science, reviewed what he and many others describe as “the crisis in science.”

With El Niño officially over, new data shared yesterday by NASA’s GISS shows the average surface temperature was 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.57°F) above average for May 2016, the first time in eight months that it was under one degree Celsius. Even the satellite temperature record released this month shows the global average temperature for May 2016 is 0.55 degrees Celsius (0.99°F) above the thirty-year average for that month, down 0.16 degrees Celsius (0.29°F) from last month. The satellite’s average global temperature is for the lower troposphere, which is the air from the ground to about four miles up.

Ridd was punished by James Cook University for “not displaying responsibility in respecting the reputations of other colleagues.” The university even warned that if he does this again, he’ll be tried for serious misconduct.

The latest perversion in research ethics comes to us from James Cook University in Australia. The Australian has the scoop, but it is behind paywall. Michael Bastasch of the Daily Caller has an article on this University Censures Science Prof For Fact-Checking Global Warming Claim. Excerpts:

An Australian university recently censured marine scientist Paul Ridd for “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution,” because he questioned popular claims among environmentalists about coral reefs and global warming.

Some claim the entire notion that human addition of CO2 to the atmosphere is causing global warming is a deliberately created myth, that it was produced to isolate CO2 as a serious environmental problem that required curtailing the economies of developed countries. To enhance the threat required endangerment to plants, animals, and humans. The list of threats is endless because proponents of AGW can take everyday natural events and say they are not ‘normal.’ They know that most don’t know what is normal, as I discussed in a previous article, and that what is a ‘normal’ climate, changes with time. Many people use these interchangeably with natural and unnatural. The list of myths attributed to global warming is endless, but one started a few years ago titled, “A complete list of things caused by global warming” keeps expanding.

There is added confusion in the climate debates because proponents continually interchange ‘natural’ and ‘normal.’ It is a reflection of the philosophical and intellectual confusions and contradictions that result from the deception. It probably also reflects the underlying anti-humanity of many extreme environmentalists. For example, in Global Warming: The Greenpeace Report (1990), edited by Jeremy Leggett, says CO2 is added to the atmosphere naturally and unnaturally. By unnatural they mean the portion comes from humans. Is it reasonable to assume that if what we do as animals is unnatural, then we are unnatural? Goethe confronted the dilemma when he said,

“The unnatural – that too is natural.”

Ironically, the marketplace passed judgment on Leggett’s work. A paperback edition is available for one (1) cent assuming you are prepared to pay the $3.99 shipping. By comparison, a 2004 second edition of a true work of science, Jean Grove’s The Little Ice Age, originally published in 1988, is available in hardcover discounted at $657.82 with free shipping.

Combine these confusions of natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal with incorrect science and you create myths such as the claim that with global warming storms will become more frequent and severe.

The most frequent type of storms, which probably kill far more people over time than hurricanes or any other extreme weather phenomenon, is Mid-Latitude Cyclones. Figure 1 shows a map of the Low-Pressure Center and the wave that forms to create Cold and Warm Fronts.

NOAA announced this weekend that there is a 75 percent chance a La Niña will form in the equatorial Pacific Ocean by fall, a phenomenon that is the flip side of the now-deceased El Niño.

Currently, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have returned to normal and experts think a La Niña will develop from July through September, bringing cooler temps this winter. La Niña events occur when cooler-than-normal surface waters of the equatorial (tropical) Pacific Ocean are observed.

FOREWORD

In 2010 Jason J. Sharples, an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, wrote an article titled ‘Watching the World Cup’. Despite the title, the article addresses a number of papers and articles refuting the theories of black holes and Big Bang cosmology written by Stephen J. Crothers. In his article, Sharples has committed several major errors, and resorted to language unbefitting a publicly funded professorship when addressing the person of Crothers.

After some rolling preamble, Sharples disputes two matters addressed by Crothers: (a) Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence, (b) Einstein’s pseudotensor. In the first case Sharples incorrectly argues that multiple arbitrarily large finite masses are not involved in its definition. In the second case he failed to understand the problem and thereby expounded upon an entirely different matter that was never contested by Crothers in the first place – Sharples confounded the Einstein tensor for Einstein’s pseudotensor and consequently did not even address the issue.

Jason J. Sharples is an Associate Professor of applied mathematics at the University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, in Canberra, Australia. In 2010 he wrote an article titled ‘Watching the World Cup’ [1]. This article seems not to have been formally published but Sharples has made it freely available on the World Wide Web, and it is even cited by critics [2] of Crothers as ‘proof’ of errors committed by Crothers. The very title of the article by Sharples has attached to it a footnote which reads:

Self-proclaimed environmentalists and people who use the environment as a vehicle for political control, often the same people, have not quite destroyed environmentalism.

They are running out of exotic scares as coral bleaching, ocean acidification and a multitude of other claims prove unwarranted.

A sign of desperation is the shift to much larger targets, but they pose the problem that people know a little more and basic questions raise immediate doubts.

Water is the latest target. More and more stories about running out of water appear. Most are linked to the false claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that droughts will increase in severity with global warming. It’s illogical because higher temperatures mean increased evaporation and more moisture in the air to create precipitation, but that doesn’t stop them. It’s part of the ongoing standard chain that links too many people with too many demands on limited resources causing environment collapse. The real goal is total political control, the shut down of industry and ultimately elimination of people.

I warned the world before, and they ignored me, but the evidence continues to mount. The Southern Hemisphere, and maybe the entire world, is headed for a frozen doom.

All day long polar orbiting satellites fly over the Antarctic and the surrounding ocean and measure the extent of the sea ice.  The amount of ice waxes and wanes with the seasons, ranging from about 2 to 16 million square kilometers between southern summer and winter.

Thirty years of this satellite data have made it possible to calculate the average ice extent for any given day of the year.  The deviation from this average is called the “anomaly.”  It is this anomaly data that reveals the impending drastic changes in the Southern Hemisphere.

Here is the anomaly data for the last three years from the University of Illinois’ Polar Research Group…

“I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.

“If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he says.

This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity.

There is a new company, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies(HTT) that intends to revolutionize high speed continental travel. It’s CEO, Dirk Ahlborn, recently announced an agreement with the Slovakian government to build Hyperloops from Vienna, Austria to Bratislava, Slovakia, and from Bratislava to Budapest, Hungary. Its competitor, Hyperloop One, recently tested an open air propulsion test of a vehicle with its “Blade Runner” test rig.

The Japanese “bullet trains” going at 200 mph are like snails in comparison. The new hyper-things are envisaged to do about 760 mph. That’s even faster than modern transatlantic planes by a good measure.

So, what’s the Idea?

Well, see for yourself in the nearby picture. A kind of a sealed capsule travelling in an airtight tube that has a vacuum on the front end and, possibly, air pressure pushing the capsule on the rear end.

Introduction

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.

We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes—weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hotspot whatsoever.

So an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of the recent global warming. So we now know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming.

The Theory

The theoretical signatures come from the latest big report from the IPCC, which is the most authoritative document for those who believe carbon emissions caused global warming. The IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4), 2007, Chapter 9. Figure 9.1, in Section 9.2.2.1, page 675, shows six greenhouse signature diagrams.

http://ipccwg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf.

In each diagram the horizontal axis is the latitude, from the north pole (90 degrees north) through the equator to the south pole (90 degrees south). The vertical axis shows the height in the atmosphere, marked on left hand side shown as 0 – 30 km (and on the right hand side as the corresponding air pressures in hPa). The coloured regions on each diagram shows where the temperature changes occur for each possible cause (red +1°C, yellow +0.5°C, green −0.5°C, blue −1°C per century).

There is a new paper generating some press attention (e.g. Chris Mooney at the Washington Post) that strongly suggests global warming is leading to specific changes in the atmospheric circulation over the Northern Hemisphere that is causing an enhancement of surface melting across Greenland—and of course, that this mechanism will make things even worse than expected into the future.

We are here to strongly suggest this is not the case.

The new paper is by a team of authors led by Marco Tedesco from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The main gist of the paper is that Arctic sea ice loss as a result of human-caused global warming is causing the jet stream to slow down and become wigglier—with deeper north-south excursions that hang around longer.  This type of behavior is referred to as atmospheric “blocking.”

Few people know that skin is an organ; even fewer know it’s the largest organ of the body. It is the contact, called an interface, between two completely different environments; the body and the world. It controls movement of gases, liquids and solids in both directions all the time. The surface of the Earth is similar as the interface between the atmosphere and the underlying surfaces. Accurate measurement and understanding of processes are critical to what is happening in the atmosphere, under ground and in the oceans. Unless we understand the dynamics across the interface we will not know what is going on above and below the surface.

Science divides the world and its atmosphere into layers depending on what they are studying. For example, geophysicists start in the centre of the Earth with the Solid Inner Core extending through the Liquid Outer Core, the Mantle and the crust. Climate science identifies layers (Figure 1) but even at this point we begin seeing the limitations. The layers are based on energy from the Sun. They ignore volumes of geothermal energy that move through the crust, especially under the oceans where the crust is thinner and more perforated.

Simple, but major, differences between land and water illustrate the problems. Movement of heat from within the earth is different primarily because of circulation. Solar energy penetrates up to 50 meters into the ocean while it hardly penetrates the soil at all. It takes much more energy to raise the temperature of water than land, but it also cools much slower.

Rates of evaporation – that is molecules of water that are given enough velocity by heat energy to escape the surface – are also very different. There is an unlimited supply of molecules in the oceans. Since this is the major source of energy transfer to the atmosphere, it is critical to weather and climate.

Figure 1 shows atmospheric layers. It shows the boundaries (interfaces) above the surface, such as the Tropopause and the Stratopause but leaves out the major critical interface between the atmosphere and the earth. These boundaries separate by temperature, but you can use other measures. The term atmosphere is an example because it encompasses the entire region to the edge of space and is different from the lithosphere and hydrosphere. It also includes the thinnest but most important zone, the biosphere. It is a very narrow zone that contains virtually all life on the planet yet is mostly within a few meters of the surface.