Editor of Principia Scientific International (PSI), John O’Sullivan and I converse with each other by email.  And I wrote to him about the alchemists whom I consider to be my ancestors as a chemist.  And he replied:  “Yes, am familiar with the alchemists, especially Isaac Newton and appreciate you making the connection with PSI insofar as many of our founder members have great respect for the traditions and evolution of the (English) scientific method.”  And he concluded:  “We certainly would welcome more articles giving readers insight into the history and importance of empiricism, experiment and not merely confined to theoretical discourse.”

I write this before Feynman’s Blunder—Part 1 has been published.  I do so because at the end of this article I had written:  ‘This article was titled (Feynman’s Blunder—Part 1) because I want to give a reader an opportunity to comment as to what his blunder was.”  For I anticipate (hypothesize) that there will be no comments. 

For if this proves to be the case, Feynman’s Blunder has more members who are at fault for not correcting his most elementary blunder.  Of course, I recognize that such a conclusion implies that someone actually read Feynman’s Blunder—Part 1 to the end.  However, if a reader of PSI articles did not read this short article to the end, it only confirms that they are part of the problem—uninformed people about what good science is—which PSI is trying to correct.  “The essence of genuine scientific inquiry shall exemplify the sui generis, or the abiding maxim that goodness is indefinable and exists in science only insofar as the pursuit of truth ought to be our abiding goal.”  I send this introduction of this article to John O’Sullivan so there is a witness that I wrote it before Feynman’s Blunder—Part 1 had been published.  For this previous article is an experiment.

With July barely over, #NASA is trumpeting that 2016 is on track to be the hottest year ever, even though the satellite record is telling us something quite different. Indeed, July 2016 is continuing the trend of temperatures returning to normal now that the recent #El Niño has officially ended.  El Niños are naturally occurring events where the tropical Pacific Ocean becomes warmer than normal for an extended period and can influence climate across the globe.

A Southwest Research Institute-led team has documented atmospheric changes on Io, Jupiter’s volcanically active satellite, as the giant planet casts its shadow over the moon’s surface during daily eclipses. 

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and many universities are at a loss to explain recent conflicting temperature trends from Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. It can be boiled down to this: temperatures of the Earth’s three big fluid systems are each trending in different directions. The temperature of the Pacific Ocean is rising, the temperature of the atmosphere has remained constant, and the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean is cooling.

That’s a problem.

In 1989, NOAA’s Tom Karl said earth warmed rapidly from 1881 to 1919, and cooled from 1921 to 1979.

7 Dec 1989, Page 14 – at Newspapers.com

Now, NOAA’s Tom Karl shows the exact opposite. He shows cooling from 1881 to 1919, and  warming from 1921 to 1979. Both trends were reversed since 1989.

Climate at a Glance | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

Climate at a Glance | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

Settled science means turning warming into cooling and cooling into warming, when politics demands it.

In spite of all the well publicized concern about global warming, you must understand that there is still considerable uncertainty among scientific experts about a number of critical factors which determine global warming.” NOAA administrator John Knauss said in a statement issued for the geophysics meeting.

Read more at realclimatescience.com

Researchers from Boston University’s (BU) Center for Space Physics report today in Nature that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot may provide the mysterious source of energy required to heat the planet’s upper atmosphere to the unusually high values observed. 

In previous postings, we investigated the likelihood of a serious climate-related concern expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that CO₂-induced global warming will lead to a future increase in the number of heat related deaths worldwide (see, for example, On The Bright Side: Declining Deaths Due to Hot and Cold Temperatures in Hong Kong and Response to Heat Stress in the United States: Are More Dying or Are More Adapting?).  In short, we found there is an absence of empirical data to support the IPCC’s claim.

The latest study to investigate this topic comes from Arbuthnott et al. (2016), who introduce their work by noting that “interest in understanding temperature related health effects is growing.” And as their contribution to the subject, they set out to examine “variations in temperature related mortality risks over the 20th and 21st centuries [in order to] determine whether population adaptation to heat and/or cold has occurred.”

A new paper published yesterday says global warming may expose a now-defunct U.S. military base and its nuclear waste to the ##Environment, but only if Greenland’s massive ice sheet thawed. The problem: the ice covering the abandoned installation isn’t melting, but actually gaining in ice.

The paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, said it may become exposed in 75 years, if at all. That didn’t stop the usual suspects from leaping to alarmist headlines about a Chernobyl-like disaster lying in wait beneath Greenland’s ice sheet.

Until about 1980, US stations averaged  about 102 degrees between their hottest and lowest temperature of the year. The peak year was 1936 at 113.6 degrees spread, and this year so far has been the least extreme with only 92 degrees average spread. This number will undoubtedly become slightly larger as the year progresses. What I find interesting is that this metric was fairly steady until the early 1980’s, and has dropped off sharply since then.

Bloomberg reports “As Corn Devours U.S. Prairies, Greens Reconsider Biofuel Mandate”. I can only say “What took you so long?” To wit:

“Environmentalists who once championed biofuels as a way to cut pollution are now turning against a U.S. program that puts renewable fuels in cars, citing higher-than-expected carbon dioxide emissions and reduced wildlife habitat.”  

According to Bloomberg, several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) including Friends of the Earth, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are now bemoaning the detrimental effects of the Renewable Fuel Standard.

A new study of the Asian Monsoon record has shed light on Earth’s changing climate over the past six-hundred and forty millennia. Drawn from an exhaustive and painstaking examination of the relative proportions of the oxygen isotopes ¹⁶O and¹⁸O in stalagmites, records from Chinese caves characterize changes in both the Asian monsoon and global climate. This record supports the idea that the 100,000-year glacial/interglacial cycle is an average of discrete numbers of precession cycles. Further more, changes in insolation, the amount of energy received from the Sun, triggers deglaciations and shorter term millennial events. No evidence supporting the upstart theory that CO₂ controls climate change is reported.

It is widely assumed that sea levels have been rising in recent decades largely in response to anthropogenic global warming. However, due to the inherently large contribution of natural oscillatory influences on sea level fluctuations, this assumption lacks substantiation. Instead, natural factors or internal variability override the detection of an anthropogenic signal and may instead largely explain the patterns in sea level rise in large regions of the global oceans. 

Scientists who have recently attempted to detect an anthropogenic signal in regional sea level rise trends have had to admit that there is “no observable sea-level effect of anthropogenic global warming,” or that the “sea level rise pattern does not correspond to externally forced anthropogenic sea level signal,” and that sea level “trends are still within the range of long-term internal decadal variability.”

Below are highlighted summaries from 4 peer-reviewed scientific papers published within the last few months.

There is a hierarchy of models in the sense they offer insight into the thing modeled. The order of importance is: causal, deterministic, probabilistic, statistical. Most models use mixtures of these elements. 

All models have this form: a set of premises, which include any number of facts, truths, supposeds, data, and such forth, and a proposition of interest, which is the thing being modeled conditional on those premises.

A classic—or perhaps better, as you’ll agree, classical—causal model “Socrates is mortal” given “All men are mortal and Socrates is a man.” The model predicts Socrates will die because of the nature of all men. It is man’s nature to die, and Socrates (and you, dear reader) are among the race of men. We knowall men are mortal from the necessarily limited sample of observations of past men, and from the induction of these dead men to the entire race.

A potential lifesaver lies unrecognized in the human body: Scientists at the University of Tübingen and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have discovered that Staphylococcus lugdunensis which colonizes in the human nose produces a previously unknown antibiotic.  As tests on mice have shown, the substance which has been named Lugdunin is able to combat multiresistant pathogens, where many classic antibiotics have become ineffective. The research results will be published on 27 July in the scientific journal Nature.

This article is part of an occasional series exploring the possibility (or rather the necessity) of a sociological analysis of climate catastrophism. Others can be found at

https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/category/sociology-of-climate-change/

It argues 1) that the key criterion for identifying the social class which has propelled climate catastrophism to centre stage (the green blob; the chattering classes, Guardianistas, the “right on” generation – define them how you will) is university education and 2) an explanation is required of how such a weak (woolly, vague, unconvincing) idea as environmentalism (“we live on a fragile planet”; “we need to recycle/conserve/cycle to work to prevent the sixth great extinction” etc.) has conquered the world. Both ideas I have lifted from the work of Emmanuel Todd, a French historian and demographer I have often referred to in different posts. I’ve added an appendix describing Todd’s work, which is of great interest outside the narrow bounds of an analysis of climate catastrophism.