What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions — capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) — and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.
Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists — 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 — were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal — and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails.
Now peer-review is dead, so should be the IPCC, and Al Gore’s future as a carbon-trading billionaire. Will it happen? I shouldn’t hold your breath.
James Delingpole, “Climategate: what Gore’s useful idiot Ed Begley Jr doesn’t get about the ‘peer review’ process”, Telegraph.co.uk, 2009-11-26
November 26, 2009
QotD: How AGW became the majority view
Red flag checklist
The recent Climate Change/AGW revelations (which the Climate Czar is still assuring people won’t actually change anything) are of great interest to climate skeptics, but the systematic perversion of the normal scientific methods shows how easy it has been for a particular viewpoint to be lauded as the consensus. Here is a list of suspicious behaviour which could be red flags for scientists trying to circumvent normal checks and balances:
(1) Consistent use of ad hominem attacks toward those challenging their positions.
(2) Refusal to make data public. This has been going on in this area for some time.
(3) Refusal to engage in discussions of the actual science, on the
assumption that it is too complicated for others to understand.(4) Challenging the credentials of those challenging the consensus position.
(5) Refusal to make computer code being used to analyze the data public. This has been particularly egregious here, and clear statements of the mathematics and statistics being employed would have allowed the conclusions to be challenged at a much earlier stage.
November 25, 2009
Tonight on Iowahawk Geographic
This is a fascinating show on a topic of great public and scientific interest:
Narrator
This is the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, home of one of the largest nesting populations of climate scientists in Europe.
Gentle ant’s-eye scene of idyllic campus lawn, strewn about with drunken mating undergraduates
Each year it attracts magnificent migratory flocks of graduate students, adjuncts and visiting faculty from across the northern hemisphere.
Shots of jumbo jets landing at Heathrow; herds of climate researchers busily milling at Duty Free shops, retrieving baggage, phoning for prearranged limo service
Within minutes of arriving on campus, the migratory researchers approach the entrance of the Climate Research Unit and perform the secret credential dance, fiercely displaying their prominent curriculum vitae. This signals to the security drone that they can be trusted with the sacred electronic lanyard badge that will grant them entrance to the hive’s inner sanctum.
During the upcoming research season, this hive alone will produce over 6 million metric tons of grant-sustaining climate data guano, but until recently little was known about the elusive genus of homo scientifica living inside. Where do they come from? What strange force draws them here year after year? In order to unravel the mystery, Iowahawk Geographic documentary filmmaker David Burge undertook a painstaking one-week project to finally capture the climate researchers in their native habitat.
November 23, 2009
NFL to finally address concussion problems
The NFL has been under fire recently for failing to address the serious problems players have had with concussions. A concussion is a potentially serious injury, yet the league has been unwilling to force teams to treat their injured players with due care: a player who has “had his bell rung” is often encouraged to return to play, which drastically increases the chance of further — and more serious — injury. Alan Scharz reports:
[. . .] the league will soon require teams to receive advice from independent neurologists while treating players with brain injuries, several people with knowledge of the plan confirmed Sunday.
For generations, decisions on when players who sustain concussions should return to play have been made by doctors and trainers employed by the team, raising questions of possible conflicts of interest when coaches and owners want players to return more quickly than proper care would suggest.
As scientific studies and anecdotal evidence have found a heightened risk for brain damage, dementia and cognitive decline in retired players, the league has faced barbed criticism from outside experts and, more recently, from Congress over its policies on handling players with concussions.
This is good, not only for current NFL players, but also for college and high school football players, as the professionals set an example to younger players about how to play the game and how to cope with injuries. You can’t just “walk off” a brain injury, and the NFL has to set the precedent of treating concussions as the serious injuries they are. Gregg Easterbrook has been calling for the NFL to show leadership on this issue for quite some time, most recently in his column last week:
The league’s position is that individual clubs set their own medical policies, but that is a transparent cop-out. Most teams will sit a player with a concussion so bad he can’t remember what he had for lunch. But as soon as the player recovers enough to recall the playbook, he may be cleared to resume competition — and may be pressured to do so. Yes, there is an assumption of risk to performing in the NFL, and players know the sport is dangerous. But going on the field with an elbow that hurts is very different from competing with an injured brain. Players recovering from concussions shouldn’t be allowed back on the field until after extended rest. It should not be the player’s decision to make — that is management evading its responsibility, as well as a form of pressure on athletes who are expected to be macho about knowing no fear. The NFL should prohibit concussed players from returning until they have had a mandatory recovery period, or been cleared by neurologists unaffiliated with the league, or both.
This is especially important because NFL behavior sets the tone for college and high school players — and there are 500 of them for each one in the NFL. When high school or college players see NFL athletes rushing back onto the field soon after concussions, or pretending to the trainer to be fine in order to be sent back in, that’s the behavior they emulate. If the NFL instead sent a message that all concussions should be treated seriously and conservatively, college and high school players would imitate that.
In addition to being more careful about treating injured players, the league should also change two pieces of equipment that could help to increase player safety in the area of concussions:
The league should mandate helmets with concussion-reducing designs — the Riddell Speed (successor to the Revo), the Schutt Ion and the Xenith. None are panaceas, but all are likely to lessen concussion incidence or severity. If the NFL set an example by allowing only helmets engineered against concussions, the NCAA and eventually high schools would follow.
The league should mandate double-sided mouthguards — which are much more affordable for high schools than advanced helmets. Boxing has long required double-sided mouthguards, exactly because they reduce concussions.
November 21, 2009
Ah, those deniers are causing a ruckus again
Don’t they realize that the science is settled, all the wiser heads are in agreement, and you can’t disturb their complacency with facts?
Elizabeth sent me a link to this round-up of MSM reporting by James Delingpole, telling me that I was behind the coverage:
Meanwhile, the Climategate scandal (and I do apologise for calling it that, but that’s how the internet works: you need obvious, instantly memorable, event-specific search terms) continues to set the Blogosphere ablaze.
For links to all the latest updates on this, I recommend Marc Morano’s invaluable Climate Depot site.
And if you want to read those potentially incriminating emails in full, go to An Elegant Chaos org where they have all been posted in searchable form.
Like the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal, this is the gift that goes on giving. It won’t, unfortunately, derail Copenhagen (too many vested interests involved) or cause any of our many political parties to start talking sense on “Climate change”. But what it does demonstrate is the growing level of public scepticism towards Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. That’s why, for example, this story is the single most read item on today’s Telegraph website.
What it also demonstrates — as my dear chum Dan Hannan so frequently and rightly argues — is the growing power of the Blogosphere and the decreasing relevance of the Mainstream Media (MSM).
If it turns out that these documents and email messages are genuine, it will set back the Climate Change/Global Warming lobby quite a long ways . . . unfortunately, it will also taint a lot of other scientists who have not been involved in the mass PR campaign to push the CC agenda.
There’s also the chance that this is a sting operation designed to publicly discredit the skeptics — who have been so cunningly designated “deniers” by certain MSM outfits — by putting an irresistible temptation out there, with just enough “real” data to appear to discredit CC, and then to reveal that the most explosive and incriminating stuff is actually faked.
November 20, 2009
Thinking about the Singularity
For some of you, this will be old hat (ancient history, even). For lots of people, however, the notion of a technological Singularity will be new — and disturbing in a way that hokey woo-woo New Age 2012 Mayan calendars ending is not. Glenn Reynolds writes about it in the December issue of Popular Mechanics:
For some time now, futurists have been talking about a concept called the Singularity, a technological jump so big that society will be transformed. If they’re right, the Industrial Revolution — or even the development of agriculture or harnessing of fire — might seem like minor historical hiccups by comparison. The possibility is now seeming realistic enough that scientists and engineers are grappling with the implications — for good and ill.
When I spoke to technology pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil (who popularized the idea in his book The Singularity Is Near), he put it this way: “Within a quarter-century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it.”
Even before we reach that point, Kurzweil and his peers foresee breathtaking advances. Scientists in Israel have developed tiny robots to crawl through blood vessels attacking cancers, and labs in the United States are working on similar technology. These robots will grow smaller and more capable. One day, intelligent nanorobots may be integrated into our bodies to clear arteries and rebuild failing organs, communicating with each other and the outside world via a “cloud” network. Tiny bots might attach themselves to neurons in the brain and add their processing power — and that of other computers in the cloud — to ours, giving us mental resources that would dwarf anything available now. By stimulating the optic, auditory or tactile nerves, such nanobots might be able to simulate vision, hearing or touch, providing “augmented reality” overlays identifying street names, helping with face recognition or telling us how to repair things we’ve never seen before.
Of course, there are some very scary scenarios as well: you think it’s bad when your email address or bank information gets hacked? How much worse will it be when you’re wearing your immersive technology 24/7? And how much worse again when you’re not wearing it at all, but have it embedded in your body? Being “hacked” then becomes life endangering, not just inconvenient. Charles Stross has written a few books exploring different possible futures (particularly Glasshouse and Halting State, both excellent and highly recommended novels, BTW), and it’s just possible that he’s being too optimistic.
Destructive technologies generally seem to come along sooner than constructive ones — we got war rockets before missile interceptors, and biological warfare before antibiotics. This suggests that there will be a window of vulnerability between the time when we develop technologies that can do dangerous things, and the time when we can protect against those dangers. The slower we move, the longer that window may remain open, leaving more time for the evil, the unscrupulous or the careless to wreak havoc. My conclusion? Faster, please.
November 17, 2009
November 11, 2009
The only surprise is that it’d only be 33%
Alison Martin summarizes a survey of Quebec workers which found (among other things) that 33% of men would show up for work even if they or a family member had H1N1:
According to a poll of Quebec workers, many employees in Quebec would still show up for work even if they had the H1N1 flu virus.
Close to one-quarter of respondents to the poll conducted in September 2009 on behalf of the Ordre des conseillers en ressources humaines agréés said that they would still go to work even if they or a member of their household had the H1N1 flu virus. This attitude is even more prevalent among men, with one in three (33%) reporting that they still intended to go to work if they or a relative caught the virus.
Close to 60 per cent of respondents said that they show up for work even when they really aren’t feeling well.
“We’ve already noted that employees in Quebec tend to show up at work even when they’re ill. They don’t seem to be sufficiently aware of the risks of such behaviour, which in the end benefits neither the employee nor the employer, and definitely should be stopped,” explained Florent Francoeur, CHRP, Ordre president and CEO.
The question was clearly worded to elicit the most newsworthy headline: it’d be an odd family if everyone stayed home if even one person in the family was ill . . . and a family with limited long-term employment prospects. Private sector employers tend not to have the same kind of generous sick time provision that public sector employees get, so employees don’t tend to take as much sick time as civil servants.
For many workers, if they don’t show up for work, they don’t get paid. This is especially true at lower income levels, where missing a few days pay can be a severe economic dislocation.
November 10, 2009
Your backyard: red in tooth and claw
Stephen Malaga looks at half-baked suggestions for suburban backyards:
Environmental groups’ view of the animal world sometimes resembles Disney’s Bambi, with owls and rabbits mingling peacefully and Man lurking as the only predator, aided by his evil servant the hunting dog. A good example is the National Wildlife Federation, which wants to reintroduce wild animals into the suburban and urban enclaves from which development has expelled them by encouraging homeowners to develop “healthy and sustainable wildlife habitats” on their properties. The NWF has even produced a television program — Backyard Habitat, shown on Animal Planet — in which experts advise homeowners in places like Chicago about how to attract animals with plants they can feed on, freshwater, and places of cover like high grasses. The show especially likes to visit families with small children, emphasizing that such habitats can teach kids about wild animals.
But somehow missing from the program is one of Nature’s basic principles: the idea that hunters and the hunted evolve together. My own New Jersey backyard, a rich feeding environment that draws small herbivores with its tasty plants, dense underbrush, and drinking sources, illustrates how a residential habitat gradually becomes a killing field — in our case, one where stray cats battle over hunting turf, predatory birds dive to scoop up breakfast, and my wife and I scramble to clean up carcasses before our daughter sees them.
November 9, 2009
Coffee and the placebo effect
Neuroskeptic reports on some interesting results from a coffee study:
The authors took 60 coffee-loving volunteers and gave them either placebo decaffeinated coffee, or coffee containing 280 mg caffeine. That’s quite a lot, roughly equivalent to three normal cups. 30 minutes later, they attempted a difficult button-pressing task requiring concentration and sustained effort, plus a task involving mashing buttons as fast as possible for a minute.
The catch was that the experimenters lied to the volunteers. Everyone was told that they were getting real coffee. Half of them were told that the coffee would enhance their performance on the tasks, while the other half were told it would impair it. If the placebo effect was at work, these misleading instructions should have affected how the volunteers felt and acted.
Several interesting things happened. First, the caffeine enhanced performance on the cognitive tasks — it wasn’t just a placebo effect. Bear in mind, though, that these people were all regular coffee drinkers who hadn’t drunk any caffeine that day. The benefit could have been a reversal of caffeine withdrawl symptoms.
H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.
November 3, 2009
“Like Soylent Green, medicine is made of people”
Colby Cosh on the paradoxical nature of the public’s view of medicine:
We’re conditioned to think of “medicine” as a single, coherent planned enterprise, if not a conspiracy, and we often fear and despise it — until we decide we need it. At which point it cannot possibly move fast enough to please us. Like the state or the church, medicine is an impersonal abstraction, but one that seems to have common priorities and intentions, significant powers and one voice. Rationalists and believers in progress invoke it; nutcases and conspiracists resist it.
In a way, both are paying tribute to a fiction, much like Christians and Satanists. In real life, there is no pope or president of medicine, no temple where it can be consulted, no medical mandate of heaven. The emerging vaccine debacle, though mercifully likely to have fairly limited public-health consequences, reveals the terrible truth. Like Soylent Green, medicine is made of people. Not just doctors, but administrators, industrialists, economists and politicians — none of them angels, and none with an angel’s ability to predict mass behaviour, perceive and weigh risk, or foresee the judgment of future history.
[. . .]
People have always been prone to weird beliefs, but now there is a medium that compounds those beliefs, allows them to coalesce into a historical counter-narrative and unites their holders like never before. For the first time, there are people who seem not just weird, but positively, thoroughgoingly “weird-ist.” Try spelunking amidst the Internet detritus of the anti-vaccine movement. There is no philosophical reason that strange beliefs about vaccination should correlate with fringe beliefs about UFOs, reptilian elites, 9/11 “truth,” JFK, the world ending in 2012 you name it. Yet the correlation is real, and not hard to confirm.
Challenge to human gene patents allowed to proceed
A judge has allowed an ACLU challenge to two human gene patents to go to court:
The first-of-its-kind lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law claims that the patents violate free speech by restricting research.
U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet of New York, in ruling that the case may proceed to trial, noted that the litigation might open the door to challenges of a host of other patented genes. About one-fifth of the human genome is covered under patent applications and claims.
Sweet wrote:
The challenges to the patents-in-suit raise questions of difficult legal dimensions concerning constitutional protections over the information that serves as our genetic identities and the need to adopt policies that promote scientific innovation and biomedical research. The widespread use of gene sequence information as the foundation for biomedical research means that resolution of these issues will have far-reaching implications, not only for gene-based health care and the health of millions of women facing the specter of breast cancer, but also for the future course of biomedical research.
The case against the patent office and patent-holder Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City is the first to challenge a patented gene under a civil rights allegation — in this case the First Amendment.
October 29, 2009
Property overgrown? Send in the goats
Mark Frauenfelder looks at an old-fashioned way to cut back the undergrowth — rent a flock of goats:
GOOD reports on the Seattle-based Rent-a-Ruminant organization that hires out goats to people who want to clear brush on their property.
[R]ather than spending tons of money and time on diesel-powered machines, filing the proper permits, and administering dangerous herbicides, the Seattle-based Rent-a-Ruminant organization will loan your a team of 100 goats for all your brush-clearing needs — all at a very modest rates. As Serious Eats explains, the benefits of goats are numerous: they eat just about anything, they can work on uneven ground, you don’t need permits to use them, and they can clear a quarter-acre in about three days.
October 28, 2009
Updated “powers of ten” visual aid
Use the slider at the bottom to dive down, down, down.
H/T to Felicia Day for the link.
