“The politician is sometimes tempted to encroach on the normal territory of the scientific estate. In such issues the problem is less often whether politics will presume to dictate to science than it is how much politics is to be influenced by the new findings of science.”[1]
The climate change debate has exposed a deeper problem with our science and scientific knowledge. The problem is not that science is unable to answer all of our questions. Rather, the problem is that the body politic has come to see science as an instrument to pass on ‘hot potatoes,’ i.e. complex issues raising a large range of empirical questions and implicating important value judgments. Scientists have failed to point out the limits of science and to bounce the ball back to the politicians.
In the market for ‘evidence’ for policy making, politicians demand arguments for their desired policies, which scientists supply in the form of research and reports. Their research, however, does little to resolve the policy issues faced by the body politic, and does not advance social progress. Climate science is the poster child of these developments.
Rajiv Singh started thinking about how to do his part to fight global warming 15 years ago. Dr. Singh, a scientist at Honeywell’s lab in Buffalo, began running computer models of tens of thousands of molecular combinations. He was seeking a better refrigerant, one of the most vexing chemicals for the environment.
Refrigerants cool homes, cars and buildings but also warm the planet at a far higher rate than carbon dioxide. Dr. Singh was searching for one stable enough to be useful but that degraded quickly so it did not linger to trap heat in the atmosphere.
“You have to hit the chemistry books,” he said in a recent interview.
One of the most detailed genomic studies of any ecosystem to date has revealed an underground world of stunning microbial diversity, and added dozens of new branches to the tree of life. The bacterial bonanza comes from scientists who reconstructed the genomes of more than 2,500 microbes from sediment and groundwater samples collected at an aquifer in Colorado.
Stunning diversity, visualized. All the known major bacterial groups are represented by wedges in this circular “tree of life.” The bigger wedges are more diverse groups. Green wedges are groups that have not been genomically sampled at the Rifle site–everything else has. Black wedges are previously identified bacteria groups that have also been found at Rifle. Purple wedges are groups discovered at Rifle and announced last year. Red wedges are new groups discovered in this study. Colored dots represent important metabolic processes the new groups help mediate.
Tracking atmospheric particles in a pristine environment will help scientists understand the impact of industrial aerosols on climate, say researchers at conclusion of a study on Amazonian rainstorms.
Scanning the pristine skies above the Amazon rainforest revealed that small aerosol particles that form naturally in the upper atmosphere are carried to the lower atmosphere by rapid downdrafts associated with rainfall.
There, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by trees react with oxidants, and the oxidation products condense on the small particles and make them grow into the “nuclei” around which clouds form. Studying this process in a clean environment will help scientists improve their understanding of the effects of industrial era emissions on climate.
[Image Credit: Luiz. A. T. Machado, National Institute for Space Research, São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil]
Blackgram is a popular bean grown primarily in southern Asia on the Indian subcontinent. It is a fairly nutritious pulse, recommended for diabetics and shown useful in helping to lower cholesterol. In addition, it contains high levels of protein, potassium, calcium, iron, niacin, thiamine and riboflavin.
Given the importance of this crop in the diets of many people in India, Pakistan, and the surrounding region, it comes as little surprise that researchers are interested in how blackgram might respond to future changes in atmospheric CO2and climate. Such was the case with the ten-member research team of Vanaja et al. (2015), who grew eighteen genotypes of blackgram from seeds in plastic pots inside open-top chambers at three CO2 levels (390, 550 and 700 ppm) across three distinct growing seasons (summer, rainy and winter seasons).
Their purpose in doing so was to evaluate which genotypes would perform the best in each growing-season climate regime under elevated CO2. Plant performance was thus evaluated based upon analyses of five morphological (root length, root volume, shoot length, number of branches and number of pods), six dry weight (root, stem, leaf, pod, fodder and total biomass) and eight yield (filled seed number, total seed count, filled seed weight, seed yield, test weight, husk weight, percentage of shelling and harvest index) plant growth traits.
NOAA confirmed that as of Oct. 24, 2016, no major hurricane has struck the U.S. in 11 years, despite climate change claims they should be increasing.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that today marks the eleventh year since a major hurricane has struck the U.S. mainland, despite persistent claims they would increase in a warming world. Dennis Feltgen, a NOAA spokesperson, said, “I can confirm that as of October 24, 2016, it will be a complete 11 years since a major hurricane has struck the United States, as defined by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale of being a Category 3 or higher.”
NOAA also announced, “The current streak of no major hurricane landfalls onto the U.S. mainland remains intact. The last one to do so was Hurricane Wilma on October 24, 2005.” NOAA defines a major hurricane as having sustained winds of 111 mph or higher. Since NOAA started record keeping in 1851, this is the longest the U.S. has gone without a major hurricane making landfall, breaking all previous records.
The East Anglia email scandal of 2009 was a major turning point in the climate change crusade. At the time I compared it to the Pentagon Papers—something that changed the narrative fundamentally.
Now there’s another climate scandal breaking. The Daily Mailreported yesterday about the apparent fraud of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP), a project of the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds in the UK.
It has been closely associated with top figures from Tony Blair’s government, especially Nicholas Stern (of the shoddy Stern Review, for people with long memories of climate stunts). It seems the CCCEP is guilty of appropriating other people’s work and calling it their own. Maybe no one would care except that CCCEP has received a lot of taxpayer funding—at least 9 million Pounds worth to date.
Here’s some of David Rose’s report:
One of the world’s leading institutes for researching the impact of global warming has repeatedly claimed credit for work done by rivals – and used it to win millions from the taxpayer.
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday also reveals that when the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) made a bid for more Government funds, it claimed it was responsible for work that was published before the organisation even existed. Last night, our evidence was described by one leading professor whose work was misrepresented as ‘a clear case of fraud – using deception for financial gain’. The chairman of the CCCEP since 2008 has been Nick Stern, a renowned global advocate for drastic action to combat climate change. . .
Part of the CCCEP’s official mission, which it often boasts about in its public reports, is to lobby for the policies Lord Stern advocates by presenting the case for them with British and foreign governments and at UN climate talks.
Last night, CCCEP spokesman Bob Ward admitted it had ‘made mistakes’, both in claiming credit for studies which it had not funded and for papers published by rival academics. ‘This is regrettable, but mistakes can happen… We will take steps over the next week to amend these mistakes,’ he said.
One of the persons quoted to devastating effect of Richard Tol, one of the world’s top environmental economists:
The paper cited by the CCCEP of which Prof Tol is a co-author was published online by the Ecological Economics journal on July 31, 2008.
At the time, he and the lead author, David Anthoff, were on the staff of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin.
Their co-author, Cameron Hepburn, was at Oxford University. The research on ‘the marginal costs of climate change’ was funded by the European Commission and the Stockholm Environment Institute. . .
Prof Tol said: ‘Our paper had no relationship to the CCCEP. It came out of David Anthoff’s masters thesis. At the time, the CCCEP did not exist, and it only came into existence after the paper was published. Fraud means deception for financial gain. That is what this is.’
I’m a big fan of Richard Tol, for what it’s worth:
Image copyright: JAN CHLEBIK/THE ICR)Image caption: Andrea Sottoriva used to work analysing the results experiments conducted with the Large Hadron Collider
“If you want a career in medicine these days you’re better off studying mathematics or computing than biology.”
This pithy aside was delivered by Sir Rory Collins, the head of clinical trials at Oxford University, in the middle of a discussion about the pros and cons of statins. It is a nice one-liner, but I didn’t think much more about it until a few days later, when I found myself sitting in a press conference to mark the launch of a new initiative on cancer.
Rubbing shoulders on the panel with the director of the Institute of Cancer Research, Professor Paul Workman, was a scientist I didn’t recognise, but it soon became clear this was exactly what Sir Rory had had in mind.
Dr Andrea Sottoriva is an astrophysicist. He has spent much of his career searching for Neutrinos – the elusive sub-atomic particles created by the fusion of elements in stars like our sun – at the bottom of the ocean, and analysing the results of atom smashing experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva.
“My background is in computer science, particularly as it applies to particle physics,” he told me when we met at the ICR’s laboratories in Sutton.
Everyone knows they need to manage their stress. When things get difficult at work, school, or in your personal life, you can use as many tips, tricks, and techniques as you can get to calm your nerves.
So here’s a science-backed one: make a playlist of the 10 songs found to be the most relaxing on earth.Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one’s health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions.
Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck.
The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.
According to Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International, which conducted the research, the top song produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date.
In fact, listening to that one song — “Weightless” — resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants’ overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resting rates.
Try it….
That is remarkable.
Equally remarkable is the fact the song was actually constructed to do so. The group that created “Weightless”, Marconi Union, did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
When it comes to lowering anxiety, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stress either exacerbates or increases the risk of health issues like heart disease, obesity, depression, gastrointestinal problems, asthma, and more. More troubling still, a recent paper out of Harvard and Stanford found health issues from job stress alone cause more deaths than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.
In this age of constant bombardment, the science is clear: if you want your mind and body to last, you’ve got to prioritize giving them a rest. Music is an easy way to take some of the pressure off of all the pings, dings, apps, tags, texts, emails, appointments, meetings, and deadlines that can easily spike your stress level and leave you feeling drained and anxious.
Of the top track, Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson said, “‘Weightless’ was so effective, many women became drowsy and I would advise against driving while listening to the song because it could be dangerous.”
So don’t drive while listening to these, but do take advantage of them:
October 24th marked the 11-year anniversary of the last “major” hurricane to make landfall on the United States. On the morning of October 24, 2005, Hurricane Wilma hit the southwest Florida peninsula as a Category 3 storm, and since then, no other hurricane Category 3 or stronger has made landfall on the U.S. — a span that is unprecedented in the historical records.
We often read articles that pit man v machines — will the robots take our jobs, will AI take over and make us stupid — and yes, I’ve written some of these articles.
But as is so often true with predicting the future, the truth will likely not be an either or scenario, but rather shades of grey. Instead of asking who will win, we should think about a merger between man and machine to bring out the best in both.
An interesting example of this is chess. It has been a long time since IBM’s Deep Blue beat the grand chess master, but more recently hybrid teams (made up up people and AI) seem to have the edge over both people only and machine only teams.
Is our growing understanding of the psychology of crowds feeding in to how we police them?
Crowds are complex. Some people fear they may turn violent, with individual personalities becoming submerged in the group mentality. But some leading social psychologists who research crowds believe that this old picture is mistaken.
“The danger with this view of crowds as inherently violent isn’t just that it’s wrong, it’s that it might become true. It might lead us to treat crowds in ways that will enrage them,” says psychologist Professor Steve Reicher.
Of course crowds are not all the same – there are different types of crowd and controlling them requires different approaches.
This is yet another crappy epidemiologic study on air pollution that proves nothing about air quality. YET, I LOVE IT.
Why? Because the study contains rarely presented evidence concerning the bias in self-reported ‘data’ versus measured data.
So this study is junk science for the usual reasons including guesstimated exposure data, dubious health effect data, omission of confounding factors, weak/non-significant statistics, and the other usual portfolio of errors common to modern epidemiology practice.
But check out the study chart, below. Note how self-reported data biases the study results toward reporting positive correlations while the measured data keeps the correlations where they should be — i.e, at zero.
Latest research shows that the so-called tell-tale ‘hot spot’ signal for man-made global warming over the tropics does not exist. As such,independent scientists say that by their own metric climate alarmists scientists have inadvertently disproved their own theory of global warming.
The findings of the researchers are that:
“These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] claim of a Tropical Hot Spot (THS), caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world. Also critically important, even on an all-other-things-equal basis, this analysis failed to find that the steadily rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”
Image copyrigh: tNASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSSImage caption: The dark patch and white spot magnified on the right are likely the impact site and parachute
The gouge in the ground probably made by Europe’s Schiaparelli probe as it hit the surface of Mars on Wednesday has been imaged by a US satellite. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has identified a large dark patch in the robot’s targeted landing zone consistent with a high-velocity impact.
Schiaparelli is widely thought to have crashed and been destroyed. Data transmitted from the probe before it lost contact indicated that its descent systems did not work properly. Its parachute was jettisoned too early and its retrorockets, designed to slow the robot to a hover just above the surface, fired only for a few seconds. They should have operated for half a minute.
The MRO imagery is not quite definitive because the resolution is low – just six metres per pixel. Its context is persuasive, however. The roughly 15m by 40m dark patch, which is probably dust and rock fragments thrown out from the impact, is sited some 5.5km west of Schiaparelli’s expected touchdown point in the equatorial Meridiani Plain.
Tellingly, the feature is not present in previous MRO pictures of the location.
The clincher, though, may be the artefact 1km to the south of the patch. This white blob looks to be Schiaparelli’s 15m-wide parachute which would have floated down behind the probe. Again, this was not present in earlier pictures.
Dennis Feltgen, a NOAA spokesperson, said, “I can confirm that as of October 24, 2016, it will be a complete 11 years since a major hurricane has struck the United States, as defined by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale of being a Category 3 or higher.”
