Tag: science

Mailvox: science is a thing of the past

A mathematician/physicist writes of the negative effect peer review has on science:

I am writing concerning some pieces of yours I’ve seen which appear to be examining the peer review process in science. There can be little doubt that the peer review system presently in place is flawed, to the extent that it is doing science a grave disservice. I have now retired after being a senior lecturer at an English university in mathematics until 2002, before transferring to physics where I remained until retirement in 2008. In that time I have seen the reviewing standards in many of the so-called prestigious physics journals, as well as more general journals such as Nature, slump. I have also noted a difference in attitude from editors. Now they usually refuse to discuss any submission; if a paper is rejected, that is normally the end of the matter.

I catalogued cases in a number of areas of physics in a book “Exploding a Myth: ‘Conventional Wisdom’ or Scientific Truth?” There is little doubt, although I cannot prove it, that those controlling science and scientific funding in the UK would not have wanted this book publicised since, if the general public became aware of what is really going on, they might be less inclined to fund these hugely expensive dubious projects like the Large Hadron Collider and LISA. Incidentally you might be interested in some of the cases I discussed, particularly the one where I and a colleague took Nature to the Press Complaints Authority – and won. It’s worth noting that “Against the Tide” by Martin Corredoira and Carlos Perelman is similarly not as well known as it should be. It too reveals much of what’s going on in science. It should be realised that everything simply supports the status quo; anything that might rock the boat is buried. Hence, truly original science is becoming a thing of the past.

It sounds like a pair of interesting books, well worth checking out. What far too many scienthologists fail to understand is that it is not the critics of science who pose a real and present danger to science, but rather the very scientists whose abuse and misuse of it are being criticized. If the public begins to tire of funding science, which is a probability in the more negative economic scenarios, scientists will have no one to blame but the charlatans and ideologues in their midst.

Climategate: a prediction

This time, it’s bound to be right. But when did the scientific method become: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Copenhagen climate conference: Met Office predict 2010 will be warmest on record. A new forecast for 2010 predicted it will be almost 1F (0.6C) higher than the long term average of 57F (14C) across the globe as a result of natural weather patterns and global warming…. However skeptics point out that the Met Office said 2007 would be the warmest on record, but it was not in the top five.

A “new forecast”? One that unexpectedly predicts record heat, no less? How very timely! I have little doubt that there was a “scientific” debate at Met Office that went something like this:

Scientist #1: “We need to do something to distract the press from that $%*#($% Jones and his leaked emails.”

Scientist #2: “Well, the PR boffins said they have almost two thousand signatures on the integrity statement.”

Scientist #3: (sarcastically) “Yeah, $*%”&*($# brilliant! ‘You think we’re fabricating the data already, so we’re going to throw more data you won’t believe at you.'”

Scientist #1: “Nine out of ten scientists believe that scientists have integrity… hmmmm, that wasn’t the best idea.”

Scientist #2: “Well, they did the falling polar bears… yeah, we really need a new PR agency.”

Scientist #1: “So, what do we do?”

Scientist #3: “We tell them that next year is going to be the Ecopolypse. Hell on Earth. The hottest on record. If they’re not scared any more, then we need to crank it up to eleven. New York under water. Polar bears stalking the streets of London. Artic beach vacations.”

Scientist #2: “But models say that it’s going to be relatively cool!”

Scientist #3: “So what? When have our models ever been right? Our climate models suck so completely that Tiger hit on them at the last British Open. It’s a no-lose proposition. Sure, we’ll probably get it wrong and then we’ll have to hope the media will cover our asses. But they’ve been solid on the CRU leak, and if we get it right, we’re @*%#(%^* gold!”

Scientist #1: “Actually, if I run Mike’s Nature trick on the latest GISS numbers, it could be 0.2F hotter next year.”

Scientist #3: “&*%* that 0.2F! We need one whole $*%$&(#$*%&$*% degree. It’s got to be simple enough that every idiot dumb enough to take this $*%! literally will do a linear extrapolation and panic when they realize that in a century, it will be 100 degrees hotter!”

Scientist #2: “You really think we can get away with it?”

Scientist #3: “Why not? We did in 2007.”

Digging deeper

Malcolm Gladwell simply isn’t smart enough to know when it’s time to throw in the towel:

First, the editorial in question made a number of other arguments that, I think, most observers would agree fall on one end of the nature-nurture continuum: that all IQ tests measure the same thing, that heredity is more important that environment in determining it, that group differences are relatively unaffected by schooling or socioeconomic factors. It also said that the IQs of different races cluster at different points, with the average IQ of blacks falling about a standard deviation lower than that of whites, and that these differences show no sign of converging over time.

Actually, first should have been Gladwell admitting that his statement about there being “no connection” between NFL draft order and quarterback performance is completely, utterly and provably false. But let’s summarize the points Gladwell makes in his continuing attempt to steer the discussion away from his egregious blunder by attacking “Stephen” Pinker. (The man’s name is actually Steven Pinker – you’d think Gladwell could get it straight by his second letter addressing Pinker’s criticism.)

1. Something Gladwell thinks about what most people would agree about an article. Who cares what Gladwell thinks about what people would agree with or not? And what does this old editorial have to do with Gladwell’s hypothesis about NFL quarterbacks anyhow? Irrelevant.

2. Only one-third of the editorial board signed the statement. BFD, especially since Gladwell doesn’t know the others “declined” to sign it, he only knows they didn’t sign it. Conclusion unsupported by facts.

3. The editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journal! Well, then it must be false, right? Genetic fallacy. And still irrelevant.

4. 14 of 52 signatories had received funding from an organization that Gladwell doesn’t like. Genetic fallacy #2. And, yes, still irrelevant.

5. I don’t know enough about a 1996 APA report on intelligence to judge if Gladwell’s summary of it is correct or not. But regardless, what does what Gladwell describes as its oppposition to “IQ fundamentalism” have to do with NFL quarterbacks and draft position anyway? All Gladwell has managed to prove proves is how far he is willing to stray from the original subject in attempting to poison the well against Pinker’s correct criticism of his egregious blunder regarding NFL quarterbacks.

However, Steve Sailer insists that there is method to Gladwell’s seeming madness:

[Y]ou’ve got to admit that Gladwell has a point: if people can make more accurate than random predictions about which college quarterbacks will be better than other college quarterbacks, then they can make predictions about more politically incorrect things, too. Thus, Gladwell wages relentless war upon predictions, upon quantitative thinking, upon science, indeed, upon that ultimate evil: knowledge.

It is no surprise that Gladwell is predisposed to attack both knowledge and the scientific fact of inherited intelligence, given how it is eminently clear that the man doesn’t possess a great deal of either.

NO evidence for global warming

Perhaps in part due to my respect for actual science, I find most scientists to be contemptible. But this news exceeds even my cynically low expectations of the charlatans. Is throwing out the original data really the scientific norm these days? Because I can testify that game developers, engineers, and computer programmers are all significantly more rigorous about protecting and saving their legacy information.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation….

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Hang on… until yesterday, weren’t the CRU scientists claiming they weren’t providing the data because they had obtained it from various governmental organizations who held the rights to it and they had no permission to release it to the public? Was Real Climate deceived by the CRU or was Real Climate lying when they wrote the following on November 23, 2009: “CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties.”

This is more than a smoking howitzer, it’s a meganuke that would – in a rational world of genuine science – blow away the AGW/CC charade permanently. It also proves that scientists should always be regarded as shady con men unless and until the scientific evidence they produce in support of their hypotheses indicates otherwise. Needless to say, all of “the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data” should immediately join the original data in the trash Every so-called “scientist” at the CRU who was involved with this fraud should be immediately fired. And those who stole taxpayer money on the basis of the scam should be prosecuted, along with those who junked the data if they did so – as suggested in the CRU emails – in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Score yet another one for the scientific skeptic. Never place any trust in an expert who can’t explain himself to your satisfaction. Especially when he’s asking you for money.

More climate fraud

This time, it’s in New Zealand:

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre. In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend…. But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result.

Worldwide fears? More like worldwide conclusions. I’m not at all surprised. The strong probability is that it has ALL been more or less faked, so the more closely the climate data is examined, the more likely it is that some amount of fraud is going to be detected. This is why no “scientific consensus” that does not involve genuinely observable and replicable science should ever be considered science. Today’s scientists held a position of public respect that relied on the successes of their predecessors but they have been shown to be unworthy of it with their stupid and shabby attempts to pass of non-science as science.

Science is not, and never will be, “what scientists happen to believe now”. That’s merely opinion, and often it’s not even informed, educated, or honest opinion.

Incredibly, the snake-oil salesmen are still trying to sell their con job to the public: “Tuesday’s report said no credible science supports an alternative hypothesis for the warming trend. Each year this decade has been among the top 10 warmest years since instrumental records began, the scientists said. ‘The science is quite decisive,’ said Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State University. ‘There is a very robust consensus about the reality of climate change and the need to confront it quickly.'”

That, by the way, is the very Michael Mann who created the “hockey stick” fraud. And unless instrumental records only began ten years ago, each year this decade has NOT been among the top ten warmest years on record. The hottest ten years according NASA’s GISS are:

  1. 1934
  2. 1998
  3. 1921
  4. 2006
  5. 1931
  6. 1999
  7. 1953
  8. 1990
  9. 1938
  10. 1939

The smoking howitzer

As bad as they are, the hacked CRU emails are actually turning out to be less damning than the comments made by the unfortunate programmer who was saddled with the responsibility for trying to transform the morass of data collected by the climatologists into something that was actually coherent and usable.

This is not good — the existing program produces a serious error when it’s run on what is supposed to be the old, working data. Harry presses on, finding a solution to that bug, going through many more issues as he tried to recreate the results of these runs for the data from 1901 to 1995. Finally he gives up. He has spoken to someone about what should be done:

AGREED APPROACH for cloud (5 Oct 06).
For 1901 to 1995 – stay with published data. No clear way to replicate process as undocumented.
For 1996 to 2002:
1. convert sun database to pseudo-cloud using the f77 programs;
2. anomalise wrt 96-00 with anomdtb.f;
3. grid using quick_interp_tdm.pro (which will use 6190 norms);
4. calculate (mean9600 – mean6190) for monthly grids, using the published cru_ts_2.0 cloud data;
5. add to gridded data from step 3.
This should approximate the correction needed.

Catch that? They couldn’t recreate the results, so they’re going back to their published data for the first 95 years of the 20th century. Only …

Next problem — which database to use? The one with the normals included is not appropriate (the conversion progs do not look for that line so obviously are not intended to be used on +norm databases).

They still don’t know what to use for the next several years. Harry gives up; it’s easier to write new codes.

22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim’s labyrinthine software suites – let’s have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

This kind of thing is as fascinating as a soap opera, but I want to know how it comes out. Near the bottom of the file, I find:

I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more.

The file peters out, no conclusions. I hope they find this poor guy, and he didn’t hang himself in his rooms or something, because this file is a summary of three years of trying to get this data working. Unsuccessfully. I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work. It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.

The appearance of these comments is particularly interesting in how it shows that the so-called “scientists” involved in the Great Global Warming Scam are not only committing blatant scientific fraud, they’re technologically incompetent to boot. Compare this fiasco with the emulator scene, where old and outdated software from decades ago, which is almost surely more complex than mere temperature data sets, is reliably supported by each new generation of hardware… at zero cost to the taxpayer or anyone else! The AGW/CC “scientists” are contemptible on several levels; only the completely clueless or totally corrupt would permit these dishonest bumblers any input whatsoever on globally significant matters of climate, economy, or government.

60 percent and make it tight

That’s the ideal covered/uncovered ratio. It is science:

Women who revealed around 40 per cent of their skin attracted twice as many men as those who covered up. However, those who exposed any more than this also fared worse…. The study, published in the journal Behaviour, found that the most popular women combined the 40 per cent rule with tight clothing and provocative dancing. The 15 per cent that combined all three criteria were approached by 40 men each.

That sounds reasonable enough. I tend to prefer something more on the order of 65 percent visible myself, but then, I’m not as easily threatened by the thought of competition as most men are. And, of course, it also depends upon the shape of that which is being exposed to the light; there are terrible forms better suited to mad Lovecraftian visions than night clubs that no man wants to see uncovered.

And it’s good that the researchers picked up on the tight thing. I am still amazed that women in the early 90s thought the baggy grunge look worked for any of them. You’d think they would have noticed that the man who popularized it married Courtney Love. All that oversized and baggy clothes do is make a woman look fat and insecure, even when she isn’t.

The great backpedal begins

A paleontologist and global warming activist openly admits That Which Was Not Supposed To Ever Be Mentioned:

We’re dealing with an incomplete understanding of the way the earth system works… When we come to the last few years when we haven’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate…We just don’t understand the way the whole system works… See, these people work with models, computer modelling. So when the computer modelling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem… Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.

No, really? In other words, ah, the science isn’t exactly, um, settled. It actually is pointing in, well, precisely the opposite direction from what we’ve been saying all along. Which, of course, is what skeptics have been pointing out from the start.

Lord Monckton is characteristically forthright on the matter: The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures…. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years…. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

The reality is that you don’t actually need to know very much about science to detect scientific fraud. I would go so far as to argue that non-scientists will tend to be better at noticing scientific fraud than scientists, for what should be the obvious reason that scientists tend to possess a lower level of people skills than the average individual. This means that scientific con men tend to be rather clumsy and obvious compared to the non-scientific variety in in the act and the subsequent excuse-making, and it’s only because their fellow scientists are also so clueless about people that they are able to get away with as much as they do.

Of course, if you expect your science BS detector to work, it helps a great deal to not have your sense of identity ensconced in romantic notions of the sanctity of science and the inherently pure intentions of scientists.

“Mission-oriented” global warming science

Well, the most recent AGW/CC unmasking certainly shows how the behavior of those pushing the great scientific fraud is nicely described by Michael Shermer’s concept of Darwin’s Dictum. Here’s a searchable archive of the infamous AGW/CC-related emails written by the con artists calling themselves “scientists” at the Climate Research Unit. As usual, the blogosphere is proving itself to be miles ahead of the mainstream media, who are still trying to ignore the giant woolly mammoth in the bathroom. There’s all sorts of stuff like this:

“I’ve got something quite interesting in progress here. If you look at the original 1989 paper, you will see that Jacoby “cherry-picked” the 10 “most temperature-sensitive” sites from 36 studied. I’ve done simulations to emulate cherry-picking from persistent red noise and consistently get hockey stick shaped series, with the Jacoby northern treeline reconstruction being indistinguishable from simulated hockey sticks. The other 26 sites have not been archived. I’ve written to Climatic Change to get them to intervene in getting the data. Jacoby has refused to provide the data. He says that his research is “mission-oriented” and, as an ex-marine, he is only interested in a “few good” series.

Jacoby has also carried out updated studies on the Gasp� series, so essential to MBH98. I’ve seen a chronology using the new data, which looks completely different from the old data (which is a hockey stick). I’ve asked for the new data, but Jacoby-d’Arrigo have refused it saying that the old data is “better” for showing temperature increases. Need I comment? I’ve repeatedly asked for the exact location of the Gasp� site for nearly 9 months now (I was going to privately fund a re-sampling program, but Jacoby, Cook and others have refused to disclose the location.) Need I comment?”

So, how about that debate, PZ?

Directly contra his past excuse-making, PZ Myers has reversed himself and decided that he is willing to engage in public debates with Unworthy Opponents again. Debates sponsored by Christian radio stations, no less! So, how about that public radio debate on the evidence for gods that Northern Alliance Radio is willing to host, PZ? Or even one on the scientific evidence for evolution? Or, in light of the very public unmasking of the AGW/CC charade, we could debate your manifestly unscientific belief in “global warming” aka “climate change”.

After all, an internationally known skeptic who appears regularly on radio shows around the world thanks to a series of correct economic and financial forecasts can’t possibly be less of a Worthy Opponent than an erstwhile Jehovah’s Witness and Intelligent Design enthusiast, right?

As everyone who posseses either above-average intelligence or a functional understanding of human nature has realized at this point, PZ is afraid to debate me because he knows perfectly well that I’ll destroy him regardless of the subject. His fear is not misplaced; he has the advantage of educational quantity whereas I have the advantage of educational quality as well as an additional 25-35 IQ points. We both know it, even if he’s not about to admit it in public. But the real problem is not that PZ is a coward, it is that he is a liar. That is why why he says he won’t debate crackpots before going on to debate crackpots and why he refuses to make an appearance on the “hostile territory” of a secular radio station before appearing on an openly Christian one.

Unfortunately, I can’t offer him a debate on teaching intelligent design in science classes because I don’t believe it should be taught there either. Nor, for that matter should evolution by natural selection. In fact, I believe the very notion of science classes for the great majority of students is eminently absurd. We know the American schools cannot teach reading, writing, logic, and personal finance to the great majority of their students, so it is easy to demonstrate that there is neither reason nor evidence to support the notion that the schools are capable of effectively teaching science of any kind.

Speaking of predictions, I note with some amusement that yesterday mainstream economists were reported to be expecting the exciting 3.5% third quarter Advance report to be revised below three percent in the 2nd report. (Remember, more than half of that was reported to be the direct result of the government-incentivized Cash for Clunkers-related increase in C.) In addition to the two scheduled revisions, I think we can safely expect further post facto revisions to the third quarter of 2009 in 2010 and beyond.