‘Cargo Cult Science’ was the title of the commencement address delivered by Richard Feynman to the graduates of Caltech in 1974.  The following are excerpts from an edited version of this address as published in his book titled “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” 

“I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science.  In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones, and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.”  …

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is persecuting ExxonMobil and now me for having opinions on fossil fuels she disagrees with. My company, the Center for Industrial Progress, is one of the 10 cited in the new subpoena of Exxon, meaning that Exxon is supposed to release any private or confidential correspondence any of its employees have ever had with anyone from my company.  I have nothing to fear whatsoever about what such a witch-hunt would or wouldn’t reveal on my end, but I do not tolerate anyone violating my rights.

So I wrote the Attorney General a three-word response that is not appropriate for a family publication. See it here.

That is all she deserved but it’s worth elaborating on some of the legal, moral, and scientific questions involved, particularly since the word “fraud” has been thrown around.

The government has no right to demand a single email of mine or Exxon’s unless it has evidence that we are committing fraud by concealing or fabricating evidence. In the case of the climate impact of CO2, this is impossible–because all the evidence about CO2 and climate is in the public domain, largely collected and disseminated by government agencies or government-funded educational institutions.

What ExxonMobil is being prosecuted for is expressing an opinion about the evidence that the government disagrees with. Or, in the case of the #ExxonKnew meme, they are being prosecuted for failing to express an opinion the government agrees with.

Introducing their work, Butterly et al. (2016) write that rising atmospheric CO₂concentrations are projected to increase the productivity of agricultural cropping systems in the future, primarily via enhanced photosynthesis and reduced evapotranspiration when water and nutrients are not limiting. One field crop that is economically important in many semi-arid locations is the common pea plant (Pisum sativum); yet according to Butterly et al., “few studies have examined the effects of elevated CO₂ on field pea.”

Therefore, in an attempt to rectify this situation, the team of four Australian researchers set out to examine the interactive effects of elevated CO₂ and soil nitrate (NO₃^–) concentration on the growth, nodulation, and nitrogen (N₂) fixation of pea plants. Nodules house bacteria that “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, which serves as plant food.

The study was conducted in a semi-arid location at the SoilFACE facility of the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources Plant Breeding Centre in Horsham, Victoria, Australia. There, pea plants were grown for a period of 15 weeks in Vertisol soils containing either 5, 25, 50 or 90 mg NO₃^–-N kg^-1 under either ambient (390 ppm) or elevated (550 ppm) carbon dioxide concentrations maintained using free-air CO₂enrichment (SoilFACE).

SAN DIEGO — A distant world could be rich in limestone, a rock that, on Earth, is produced by living processes.

The planet’s star is slowly devouring it, revealing to watching astronomers what looks like a limestone crust. On Earth, limestone has ties to living organisms, though the substance can also form without their help.

By studying the outer layers of the hungry star, scientists are able to investigate the material sloughed off from the planet.

“This material appears to have high carbon content,” said Carl Melis at a press conference on Monday (Jun 13) at the 228th American Astronomical Society in San Diego, California. Melis, an astronomer studying dying stars known as white dwarfs at the University of California, San Diego, was part of a team that identified the remains as being from a world rich in limestone’s components, carbon and calcium. 

Google caught conspiring with government-funded bodies to hide the rise in polar bear population known about since November 2015. 

polarbearscience.com reports:

It is now past the 15 June 2016 mark and the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) has still not acknowledged the 2015 IUCN Red List update on the status of polar bears. See the screencap below, taken this morning.

This notice has been up since 14 January 2016 and no reference or link to the November 2015 IUCN Red List update has been posted, even though PBSG members authored the report (pdf here)!

What they may not realize is that their silence just drives people who search the internet looking for up-to-date population and conservation status info on polar bears to this site. My posts on population size and conservation status have been the most popular posts since November.

Climate scientists have confessed they are baffled – yet again – by another all-time record area of sea covered by ice around the Antarctic coasts.

“What we’re learning is, we have more to learn,” said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, announcing the latest annual sea ice maximum for the austral continent. According to the NSIDC:

Sea ice surrounding the Antarctic continent reached its maximum extent on September 22 at 20.11 million square kilometers (7.76 million square miles). This is 1.54 million square kilometers (595,000 square miles) above the 1981 to 2010 average extent, which is nearly four standard deviations above average.

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.

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.

Misconduct by a chemist at a Colorado lab run by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has potentially affected  24 research and assessment projects, supported by $108 million in federal funding, government officials have disclosed.

According to a June 15 statement from the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the USGS, the operator of a mass spectrometer in the Inorganic Section of the Energy Resources Program’s (ERP) Energy Geochemistry Laboratory in Lakewood has been accused of scientific misconduct and manipulating data. The unit is responsible for conducting coal and water quality assessments in projects both in the United States and abroad.

A small asteroid has been discovered in an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth, and it will remain so for centuries to come.

As it orbits the sun, this new asteroid, designated 2016 HO3, appears to circle around Earth as well. It is too distant to be considered a true satellite of our planet, but it is the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or “quasi-satellite.”

It’s no secret that Dr. Sebastian Lüning’s outstanding, purely scientific Medieval Warming Period Map project has been held in very high regard within the science community.

It’s also no secret that some government-funded scientists and a slew of activists are not at all happy that it has created controversy and cast serious doubt over climate science. Indeed Lüning’s project has exposed that climate science has been a bit sloppy in its handling of the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period (MWP).

Recently Dr. Lüning entered his Medieval Warming Period Map project in a French-government sponsored contest, 100 Projects for the Climate, which has the aim of selecting and supporting the 100 best climate-related projects. 

To say the least, the project seemed to be generating a fair amount of voter activity.

Recently I got some mail from readers who had sought to cast their vote for Lüning’s project at the French-government operated website. They asked me to check the link because they had been getting the following error message:

DMI Show Greenland Was Warmer in 1930’s

According to the official numbers from DMI, annual temperatures across Greenland were just as high in the 1930s and 40s as they have been in recent years. The only exception was the unusually warm year of 2010.

But what about summertime temperatures? Since that is when most ice melt occurs, this time of year is perhaps the most relevant. 

A recent Pew Center poll shows public concern about global warming continues very low and even declining slightly. They’ve been there for a year now as comparison of their 2009/2010 results show. The most significant shift is in Energy, which dropped from 60 to 49 percent. Partly due to the declining gas prices, but also lower concern about failure of the basic energy sources and reduced threat of carbon taxes.

People pushing or accepting the false science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are reacting. Responses reveal agendas are political not science. Obama’s White House leads the charge, but all governments continue to pursue policies that make them appear green, while ignoring the facts.

The policies are unnecessary, extremely expensive, and economically destructive. The real motive is increased taxation and government control. For some, like Obama, it’s about total government control and destruction of the industrial based economy.

According to recent reports, “giant storms on gassy Uranus have astronomers scratching their heads,” because they are extremely large [~5,760 miles wide] and especially because they are extremely hot [2,800°F = melting point of steel].

How does that happen on a planet 30 times further from the Sun than Earth, and without any volcanic activity or SUVs?

From a Mannian/Hansenian runaway-greenhouse radiative-forcing effect? 

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.

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.”