Category Archives: Science

A History Of Scientific Uncertainties (on their way to policymaking oblivion)

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I know this story well about climate science. I am pretty sure it happens all the time in every scientific field that has social implications.

  1. The scientific paper details the uncertainties
  2. The IPCC chapter mentions the uncertainties
  3. The IPCC SPM (summary for policymakers) contains some indication of the uncertainties inside one item in the bibliography
  4. The Press Release doesn’t have space for the uncertainties apart from a side remark in the middle of the text
  5. The interviewed scientist is not asked about the uncertainties
  6. The journalistic article isn’t interested in the uncertainties
  7. The policymaker either doesn’t know the uncertainties exist, or pivots all his/her career about some of the uncertainties as reported to him/her third- or fourth-hand.

Broken telephones all around…

Mooney’s Folly (in two steps)

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Just read the “Conclusions” of Mooney’s book on Amazon. He has obviously gone way out of his competency and freely speaks of things he can’t possibly understand. As far as I am concerned, anybody who believes it possible to measure Liberals and Conservatives has an infantilistic view of “measure” and of “politics”.

Think about it…there are decades of studies about the meaning of “political spectrum” and everybody agrees even the usage of two axes isn’t really good enough. There comes Mooney though, and we’re back to a single axis, left and right, and we should throw all that previous work away? Unlikely.

The pages about “conservatism and the amygdala” will surely be read in the future, in comedy sketches though, like we read today about the scientist who couldn’t believe the flight abilities of the bumblebee.

Anyway, the icing on the cake is the fact that the Conclusions aren’t that idiotic really, and Mooney says he now admires “conservatives”, and goes as far as to recommend “conservatives” and “liberals” “need be operating together“. Well, Brainy Boy, that’s not achieved really by calling your book “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality“, is it??

A Sea-Surface Miracle!

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Overlong “On the adjustments to the HadSST3 data set” blog post just out (after a few technical glitches) at Judith Curry’s comes to a conclusion that aounds like yet another climate-related miracle…

HadSST3 selectively removes the majority of the long term variations from the pre-1960 part of the record. ie. it removes the majority of the climate variation…

…that cannot be attributed to anthropogenic global warming!

How unexpected!