Restoring the Scientific Method and Saving Civilization

We face a crisis of civilization, and too many who should be leading the struggle to save it have gone over to the side of the barbarians. In our upside-down world those who are destroying science claim to be acting in science's name. Science has been the salvation of humankind many times; now humankind risks abandoning it.

Restoring the Scientific Method and Saving Civilization
By Gordon J. Fulks, RealClearEnergy

"Scientists are worried, as well they should be.

The latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, John Clauser warns that climate science has become pseudoscience. Meanwhile, Jim Skea, the new Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change criticizes climate hyperbole as his boss UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres promotes “Global Boiling.” Additionally, high profile billionaires from Bezos and Soros to Zuckerberg and Gates throw their wealth into climate alarm. Mainstream media outlets are recruiting highly politicized young journalists to promote hysteria.

The fate of science is at stake, and consequently the fate of the civilization it supports.

The problems are not limited to climate science, where they are most obvious but affect many other areas where politics and careerism drive many to do sloppy or dishonest work. Pressure to succeed has driven scientists to stray from the strictly objective requirements of science to Faustian Bargains that promise fame and fortune to those who bend or break the rules. . . . "

 

Global boiling - yes, saying that is a serious discredit to the individual.

Dr. John Clauser is a physicist, not a climatologist. Who knows what he is concerned about. Maybe he doesn't like the "global boiling" statement, and I don't either.

Claims of fear of alarmism are really weak, as denialists throughout the USA claim that any indication of climate effects is alarmism.

I don't agree that there are indications of science going to hell.

In particular, you're publishing of errors caught is a sign that methods of checking are being applied.

The far greater problem is that our decision making bodies are ignoring what science has found.

If science isn't being used, then what are the sources that are used to determine what decisions to make???

And, what methods are being used to verify THOSE sources that drive decision making?

Are those methods more solid than the methods applied in science? I don't believe they even EXIST, let alone have comparable validity.

 

Dr. Clauser's concerns are explained (by him) in the link within the text: pseudoscience.

 

He has not done ANYTHING in climatology.

He questions whether the CO2 differential is coming from human activity!! There is NO doubt about that.

He suggests clouds will modify warming. That is when it's "too warm" clouds will moderate heat. But, those who study clouds do not agree with that. They point out that high clouds and low clouds have opposite effects, and that with climate change, the total cloud affect will slightly enhance warming - NOT do what this guy states.

He states that the IPCC is the worst place to get valid information. However, that is a key organization of the top climatologists working in all fields of climatology from around the world. And again, Clauser is NOT a climatologist.

He points out that there is not a climate crisis but there IS an energy crisis. He got that half right. There is a rapidly growing need for energy. But, in NO WAY does that mean that climate change isn't a serious issue. It's just a bogus comparison. Plus, he implies that the new energy needs to come from fossil fuel. This makes no sense, as clean energy sources are cheaper than fossil fuel sources, and those regions that need energy tend to be located in regions where both solar and wind are significant resources. So, even just from an air pollution point of view, why is this physicist now promoting fossil fuel?

What one sees in Clauser is stale fossil fuel oriented models and his denial of the progress in other fields of science than his own.

 

I'll take the Nobelist's concerns more seriously than your rant. Especially these days, when believers in AGW would rather repress apostate narratives than evaluate the evidence.
The RealClimate blog is a center of climate fascist consensus enforcement. Here's a case study of their work to repress scientific inquiry.
Reply to erroneous claims by RealClimate.org on our research into the Sun’s role in climate change
Guest Blogger
Dr. Schmidt and the RealClimate team apparently do not want you to read our papers. They seem to be afraid that if you did, their claims on climate change would…


From CERES-Science

By the CERES Team

In the last month, we have co-authored three papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals collectively dealing with the twin problems of (1) urbanization bias and (2) the ongoing debates over Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) datasets:

1. Soon et al. (2023). Climate. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179. (Open access)
2. Connolly et al. (2023). Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e. (Still in press, but pre-print available here)
3. Katata, Connolly and O’Neill (2023). Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0122.1. (Open access)

All three papers have implications for the scientifically challenging problem of the detection and attribution (D&A) of climate change. Many of our insights were overlooked by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their last three Assessment Reports (AR), i.e., IPCC AR4 (2007), IPCC AR5 (2013) and IPCC AR6 (2021). This means that the IPCC’s highly influential claims in those reports that the long-term global warming since the 19th century was “mostly human-caused” and predominantly due to greenhouse gas emissions were scientifically premature and the scientific community will need to revisit them.

So far, the feedback on these papers has been very encouraging. In particular, Soon et al. (2023) seems to be generating considerable interest, with the article being viewed more than 20,000 times on the journal website in the first 10 days since it was published.

However, some scientists who have been actively promoting the IPCC’s attribution statements over the years appear to be quite upset by the interest in our new scientific papers.

This week (September 6th, 2023), a website called RealClimate.org published a blog post by one of their contributors, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS). In this post, Dr. Schmidt is trying to discredit our analysis in Soon et al. (2023), one of our three new papers, using “straw-man” arguments and demonstrably false claims. . . .

 

I'm so old that I remember when we gathered facts and the reached conclusions as opposed to now when we reach conclusions then gather facts to support it.

 

Yes, Soon got discredited.

This whole "process" of posting hand picked papers purported to support a preconceived opinion to a discussion board is a totally invalid methodology.

 

A desperate claim without foundation. Making things up is not an attractive look.

 

Great way to cash in on your Nobel Prize - but then he MIGHT not be getting fossil fuel funding. But in reality this is just a replay of the “Oregon Petition” scam and a classic strawman. Declare that “scientists re saying it’s an emergency” and focus on this one point ignoring the rest of the scientific literature. As for your title - I would have more faith in this were it not for the fact that most denialists cannot critique a research paper if it bit them on the arse

 

The Nazis politicized science too. Of course governments and institutions are going to hand out more grant money to research that supports their ideology.
It's a form of confirmation bias, only in this case it's an extreme and blatant form.

When we talk about "scientists", which scientists exactly are we talking about and who employs them?

An individual who becomes scientist in climate research doesn't do so merely just do bring truth and good to the world, doing their own research on their own time, at their own expense without any compensation. That is rather rare.

Not to mention trying to get their papers published or bringing the information in their paper to the attention of other people. That's not something an individual researcher can do on their own.

 

Nope! Plenty of discrediting. You just need to look at what the real boys are saying not the fossil fuel funded astroturf sites
https://www.desmog.com/willie-soon/

 

Did they ?

Btw thanks for invoking Godwins law

 

Do you think ad hominem is mandatory?
The latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, John Clauser warns that climate science has become pseudoscience.
"A long time ago, actually my whole life, I have been an experimental physicist. Have had the distinct privilege of literally being able to talk to God even though I’m an atheist. In a physics laboratory, I am able to ask carefully posed mathematically-based questions and correspondingly observe universal truth.

To do so I make careful measurements of natural phenomena. In the physics laboratory, I once settled the debate between Einstein and Schrodinger on one hand, Niels Bohr and John von Neumann on the other. In a laboratory, I asked a simple question: which one of these two groups was right? And which one was wrong?

I didn’t know ahead of time what answer I would get. I just knew I could get an answer. Nonetheless, I found real truth. For the answer. I assert that real truth can only be found by observing natural phenomena. By carefully observing natural phenomena.

Good science is always based on good experiments. Good observations always overrule purely speculative theory. Sloppy experiments, on the other hand, are frequently counterproductive and provide scientific disinformation. That is why good scientists repeat each other’s experiments carefully.

For inspiration to young scientists, I would suggest that today is an opportune moment for careful observations of nature. Why? The current world I observe is literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation, and what I will call ”techno-cons.” Techno-cons are the application of scientific disinformation for opportunistic purposes.

Non-science business managers, politicians, politically appointed lab directors and the like are very easily snowed by scientific disinformation. Sometimes they participate in its origination. The purpose is to try to inspire you as young scientists to observe nature directly so that you too can determine real truth. Use the information gained from carefully performed experiments and research to stop the spread of scientific misinformation, disinformation and techno-cons.

Well-educated scientists can help solve the world’s problems by acting as scientific fact-checkers. A fact-checker’s most common problem, unfortunately, is determining what is true and what is not. The world is awash with someone else’s perception of truth as an alternative to real truth.

Perception of truth frequently differs significantly from real truth. Moreover, given sufficient promotion and advertising, perception of truth becomes truth. Its promotion by commercial enterprise Is called marketing, commonly used in the furtherance of political, commercial, or various opportunistic ends by its promoters. When promotion is done by government or political groups, it’s called spin or propaganda.

To such a promoter, perception of truth is truth. If you can sell it, it must be true. If you can’t sell it, it must be false. Perception of truth is also malleable. If you can sell it, if you want to sell it, and you can’t sell it, that’s easy. You change it. You can change truth. You can claim false observations if necessary.

My favorite in this act is ChatGPT. It’s very good at doing exactly that. It has lots of man-made pseudoscience to copy and manipulate and emulate. It can lie and cheat even better than its human mentors whose writings are abundant in literature. In literature, you will observe there’s far more fiction than there is nonfiction. Pseudoscience is science fiction. Unfortunately, neither computers nor human fact-checkers can, in general, tell fact from fiction. Or science from science fiction or from pseudoscience.

If Starship Enterprise can fly faster than the speed of light, it’s gotta be possible, right? All you need is dilithium crystals, right? Wrong.

Real truth is not malleable. It can only be found by making careful observations. Well-tested laws of physics and observational data are important guides to allow you to distinguish truth from perception of truth.

Now I am not alone in observing the dangerous proliferation of pseudoscience. Recently, The Nobel Foundation has formed a new panel to address the issue called the International Panel on Information Environment. They plan to model it after the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.

I think personally that they are making a big mistake in that effort because in my opinion the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation. What I’m about to recommend is in furtherance of that, of the aims of that panel.

In the past, we scientists act, have acted, as referees for journal article peer review. And we have peer-reviewed each other’s work, so as just to prevent the proliferation of scientific misinformation. That process recently seems to have broken down. Somehow it needs to be reenergized.

During my career as a scientist, I have frequently been asked to referee lots of scientific journal articles. Here I will offer a few pieces of advice. First, very importantly, your work should be based on careful observations of nature. You must try hard and recognize what I will call an elephant in the room hiding in plain sight. Ask very simple questions. I found an elephant in the room that I will be describing in my keynote address in quantum mechanics.

I have a second elephant in the room that I have recently discovered regarding climate change. I believe that climate change is not a crisis.

Real truth could be found if and only if you learn to recognize and use good science. It’s especially true when real truth is politically incorrect and does not reflect political, business aims, or desires of leaders. Even the scientific community can sometimes become diluted by pseudoscience.

Recall, if you want pseudoscience to be true, just simply spin it and it becomes true. Importantly, A referee must know and use mathematically based physics. A good scientist must also know how to derive and solve differential equations. That was the first thing I learned as an undergraduate at Caltech.

Follow the teaching of Sir Isaac Newton. He found that the world is governed by differential equations. He had to invent calculus to do it but he did it. A referee must correctly identify the dominant processes. That’s the starting point. The best way to do this is with order of magnitude estimates of the various conceivable processes.

One of my examples I can give later, I don’t have time to do it though regarding climate change, the dominant process I believe, has been misidentified by factors of 200. So if you’re off by a factor of one hundred, two hundred, your process is way too small to be important. It’s the big one – big numbers matter, little numbers can be neglected.

Sometimes people will promote new ideas that are off by factors of 1,000,000. They just simply haven’t run the numbers themselves. The most pathetic part of all this is that they don’t know that they need to know how to do that. Their lack of scientific knowledge allows science, pseudoscience, to promote what I will refer to as techno-cons, political opportunistic aims.

Techo-cons are readily unmasked and identified if you simply apply order of magnitude calculations. Very importantly, a referee must apply good calculus-based statistical methods along with good common sense. I would also like you to consider methods used by two of my former associates at University of California, Berkeley, Nobel laureates. When they were shown data, a group of data points and told “Look, the trend is obvious.” Luis Alvarez, Nobel laureate, would look at it and say, “Flattest line I ever saw.” Charlie Townes would look at it and say, “I don’t see in the data what you’re telling me I’m supposed to see.”

Beware. If you’re doing good science, it may lead you into politically incorrect areas. If you’re a good scientist, you will follow them. I have several I won’t have time to discuss, but I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.

Thank you. "

 

Sorry, but merely shouting "Climate change denial!" does not amount to discrediting.
The substance of the research might be the key to a better response.

 

And how many research papers have YOU read?

 

You both need to do your homework.

"So far, the feedback on these papers has been very encouraging. In particular, Soon et al. (2023) seems to be generating considerable interest, with the article being viewed more than 20,000 times on the journal website in the first 10 days since it was published."

Controversy surrounding the Sun’s role in climate change
Posted on September 10, 2023 by curryja
by Dr. Willie Soon, Dr. Ronan Connolly & Dr. Michael Connolly

Gavin Schmidt at realclimate.org attempts to dismiss our recent papers, including pseudo-scientific takedowns. This post takes a deep dive into the controversies.

Continue reading →

 

When you are having issues with your heart, do you make an appointment with an oncologist?

Of course not. An oncologist is a medical doctor but he's not trained in the specialty of the heart. An oncologist is an expert on cancer.

Dr. Clauser's specialty is Quantum Mechanics...not climatology.

 

However, the basic problem with the whole notion of "climate change" as religion is that the idea violates thermodynamic principles at the core of physics. That and the math behind the modeling that drives the the whole climate change panic mongering is fundamentally useless according to real math.

And climate scientists do nothing to directly refute that, assuming they could to begin with.

Quantum mechanics beat climate science every time.

 

His point is not confined to climatology: "The problems are not limited to climate science, where they are most obvious but affect many other areas where politics and careerism drive many to do sloppy or dishonest work."

Climatology is a relatively new field, so many of its practitioners have migrated from other fields. In any case, the "guild hall" objection you raise is not a serious concern.

 

Please explain how "climate change" violates thermodynamic principles.

 

The rational response is to consult science on science.

Picking and choosing papers is not a valid method of consuming science. It's based on a claim that what the authors found is somehow more important and should dominate over what has been found throughout that field of science. That is claim that requires serious investigation.

There are papers on all sorts of things that scientists in the field do not subscribe to.

Even YOU point out that there are papers that make it through the various levels of review, but then must be retracted.

Again, searching for and finding a paper that you think matches your personal opinion is NOT a valid method of consuming science.

 

Irrelevant.

 

Well, it's not really my area of expertise but this guy seems to explain it pretty well:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/the_earth_has_no_average_temperature.html

He's also got a book which goes into depth on it. Maybe you want to pick that up too.

And I know there are at least 4 or 5 other really bright folks around here if you're having trouble deciphering the technical stuff.

Enjoy.

 

A victory for science.
The Retraction Watch Database becomes completely open – and RW becomes far more sustainable


Today is a very big day for Retraction Watch and The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit. Bear with me while I explain, starting with some history.

When Adam Marcus and I launched Retraction Watch in 2010, we envisioned it as a journalism blog that would break stories no one else was covering, and examine whether scientific correction mechanisms were robust. And for some time, that’s just what it was. Our traffic and visibility grew quite quickly, but the team didn’t. It was years before we even had an intern.

Things changed in 2014 and 2015. Three philanthropies – the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), and the Helmsley Trust – approached us with some version of “We think what you’re doing is important. How can we help?”

Continue reading

 

Climate science publishing has been deeply corrupted.
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: A Deep Dive into the Academic Publishing Business
Charles Rotter
Brown makes it difficult to ignore the decades worth of abundant observations that mainstream climate change science is not just politicized, it is big business. And elite journals are in…

In Conclusion

Brown makes it difficult to ignore the decades worth of abundant observations that mainstream climate change science is not just politicized, it is big business. And elite journals are in on it.

Jessica Weinkle’s “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game” serves as a timely reminder of the complexities and challenges of the academic publishing world. From the pressures faced by researchers to the commercialization of the publishing industry, the piece offers a comprehensive overview of the current landscape. As the academic community grapples with these issues, it is crucial to prioritize transparency, integrity, and the genuine pursuit of knowledge above all else.

The complete essay is definitely worth a read.