Totalitarian Science

More calls for the punishment or imprisonment of people who disagree.  From the Providence Journal - Michael E. Kraft puts his bid in for the Stalin's Hero of the People award for demanding punishment for those who WrongThink about Climate Science.

The Narrative is strong with this one. 

The sad lack of science is the real problem. The problems with the "data" are almost too many to enumerate.  For example, I can make a case for both Global Warming and Global Cooling very easily by simply picking my starting point - which is invariably arbitrary.   Ground measurement stations suffer from urban island heat distortions in many cases. Normalization of disparate sources is highly prone to error - Especially the ideological kind - where corrections always lean in the direction of supporting the theory.




We don't have a good method of studying warming of the ocean, which has a much higher heat capacity than the dry surface.   Greenland ice is melting, quite possibly because of local geothermal activity, since records indicate that the polar ice mass is actually increasing

The "Theory" has two parts - greenhouse gas effect on temperature (fairly wide consensus) and the 3-5x positive feedback loop in the environment (which as near as I can is a primarily caused by the ubiquitous element Becauseium

If there can be a consensus in science -it should be that we haven't actually done any real science, and maybe we should.

Cosmos again

I've been watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

I've always like Neil DeGrasse Tyson.   Smart guy, articulate, seems to have a sense of humor. I was a little annoyed that he demoted Pluto but he was right.  I really enjoyed the  original Cosmos. The new one is also very good, flashy, but solid and informative.  I've been a bit surprised to see Mr Tyson's opinions on religion not come pouring out unlike another special he did, where he fairly constantly referred to all religions as ignorant superstitions.  Yeah I know that's the standard opinion of virtually every atheist I've ever met.   Those of us who don't care for organized religion and don't like to be preached at by the church, don't much like to be preached at by the other side either.  (I suppose I could be misjudging him on this but it's sure the feeling I got from his other show - The Inexplicable Universe.

One thing I found a little irritating was the time spent on global warming -slightly dates the show doesn't it? It's climate change this week.  It was expressed much as the alarmists would have it, fate accompli, the Science is Settled™.  This global warming episode was preceded by an episode that pointed out a number of scientists who were ridiculed by the "in" crowd, like the fellow who first postulated plate tectonics.  It was followed by this, from the last episode:

Only a few centuries ago, a mere second in cosmic time, we knew nothing of where or when we were. Oblivious to the rest of the cosmos, we inhabited a kind of prison, a tiny universe bounded by a nutshell. 

How did we escape from the prison? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart.

(1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me.
(2) Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so.
(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Get over it.
(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment.
And perhaps the most important rule of all...
(5) Remember: you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history -- they all made mistakes. Of course they did. They were human. 

Does that sound anything at all like Climate Science? You know the Science is Settled™, shut your mouths or we'll send  you to re-education camps, or GitMo or some other very unpleasant place.   No?  Do you suppose it's because it's not Science?  Maybe because it's the religious dogma of the leftist ideology? 

• What happens when you question them?  They tell you to shut up.  (Rule 1 - FAIL)
• What happens when you try to do your own analysis?  They try to shut you down by hiding the data (Rule 2 FAIL) 
• What happens when you compare evidence to theory? They Deny your results - Our Models Tell Us!  The evidence must be wrong! (Rule 3 FAIL)
• What happens when you ask them to follow the evidence - Prevarication, Obfuscation, Dogma (Rule 4 FAIL)
• What happens when you bring up rule 5?   Outrage  - DENIER! Off with their heads!   (Rule 5 FAIL)

Must not be Science.

Related: Why there is no Science in Climate Science

Why there is no Science in Climate Science

I keep thinking about the battle between Climate Science™and Deniers™ and wondering why there's so much resistance to an actual scientific approach.  For a while, I assumed it had to do with grant money. If you look at where funding comes from - the governments, you need to wonder why they fund non-science.  Certainly there has been sufficient skepticism from ligament sources that they might consider.   I think the answer lies in the centralization of power.

We've all heard the phrase "Never let a crisis go to waste."  A crisis is the fastest way to institute law and regulation resulting in the increase of centralized power.  Why? A crisis brings fear, and people who are afraid look for someone to protect them, sadly, we've replace family and community with government in that roll. So we have a crisis - apparently manufactured - funded by the government, supported by the liberal media.  But it's being used to enact policy that makes little or no sense.

Thermal solar is the least cost effective form of energy in use for large scale production, wind only works when the wind is blowing at a reasonable velocity,  geothermal doesn't seem to work well enough to gain traction, except perhaps in Iceland.  Photo-voltaic is enormously expensive and only useful at a small scale at present.  Both forms of solar are only effective during the day - fortunately solar covers the largest peak usage around noon, although it's less effective for the secondary peak around 5pm.   Neither wind or solar is a viable power source for virtually half the day.   Wave and Tidal power has a host of issues with maintenance costs and not in my back yard complaints.

So the government is attempting to kill coal because "global warming" at the same time, we're ripping out hydro-electric dams, we can't make progress on nuclear both of which are clean sources.  It seems to me, they're not trying to solve the claimed problem. What it looks like to me is an attempt to make people afraid so they ask for protection, since you can't protect someone from something that doesn't exist, the power mongers need to find policies that appear to do something, while at the same time waisting economic productivity (money). Why? People in debt are slaves to the system, they are put in a position where they need help, creating more dependency.  It's a self reenforcing form of serfdom.

Actual science would ruin all that.

Is it warming or cooling?

From wattsupwiththat.com 

“We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions,” says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. “Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.”

Okay, here's a thought. Stop trying to draw conclusions from questionable data.

When you get problems like this - the solution is to toss ALL of the preconceived theories.  Go back and look at the data collection methods and determine if they are adequate to the problem.  If they are, everyone needs to agree on what the hell that data is.   It's no good if one group sabotages the data to support their preferred Policy.   Let's try SCIENCE.  Why?  well the left is doing policy and calling it science, and the right is pointing out the BIG ASS HOLES in their data and how bad the computer models are that the left has come up with to support their chosen policy.  But who the hell is actually doing science?    There's probably a few, but with all the noise, it' hard to hear what they have to say. 

I think mother nature is going to solve this problem by doing something nobody wants, in a way nobody expects, because she's tired of listening to the constant squabbling....  "Just wait till your father get's home!"

The scientists politicians call this problem the Holocene temperature conundrum. It has important implications for understanding climate change and evaluating climate models, as well as for the benchmarks used to create climate models for the future. It does not, the authors emphasize, change the evidence of human impact  lack of evidence of human impact on global climate beginning in the 20th century.

       What they said  What they should have said

As near as I can tell, the left saw some localized events, Greenland Ice cover melt, receding glaciers, etc and jumped to the conclusion - Global Warming, then went about faking what ever data they thought might get them additional grant money and have been screening PANIC ever since.  Many on the right simply say - There's no warming! And while they seem to have the data on their side, it doesn't explain the melting.

Frankly the data, as it stands, sans serious tweaking to reenforce policy, pretty much says - WE DON'T FRIGGING KNOW.   There are reasons for some of the local phenomena,  that are currently blamed on "global warming".  But if there's no warming - and there doesn't seem to have been any, then we can probably conclude that's not the cause.   Maybe it's time to start looking elsewhere.    Maybe even use real SCIENCE - yeah I know Math is Hard, Science is really hard....

I haven't heard anyone claim the melt data is bogus.   It might be as simple as changes in volcanic activity under the ice, might be something else altogether.    Might be bogus too, although faking a receding glacier might be tough.   Don't know, maybe that's just what glaciers do when they're not getting bigger. 

I'm sort of curious as to why no one actually wants to know the real reason.

Re-education Camps for Climate Deniers

Here's a shock - a leftwing talking head at MSNBC thinks Republican Climate Deniers should be forced to take an Earth Sciences Course.   - Just Republicans - none of the Democrat Deniers (and there are some).

See the Video Here

Well I'm not a Republican so I'm safe.

Here's a thought - anyone who gets Air Time on Public Air Waves, For Money should have to have a degree in Science to talk about science issues....   (You know, that's an unnecessary qualification - let's just leave it as science) I'm guessing we'd get about a 99% reduction in talking heads.   Although with the current level of grade inflation - and colleges obvious preference for LibProgs - I suspect they'd be granting honorary Masters of Science degrees right and left.

Science is DEAD, long live Politics

The trend continues, any scientist who disagrees with the political agenda get's silenced.  Borepatch has some info on one of the more recent assaults on science.   If you sometimes wonder about Climate Science - just keep following the links on his site.   You will rapidly come to the conclusion that there is something going on - but it's NOT SCIENCE.

From Joanne Nova - http://joannenova.com.au

Want some more - go check out You Tube.  First look at the TED channel, there are some very interesting talks - there's also a LOT of social engineering going on - no big surprise, most of them are believers in the Leftist Agenda.

 Now search for Banned from TED talks.   Yeah there's quite a few of them, if you listen to them you'll find that they mostly talk about things that are counter to the Leftist Agenda.

One I can't quite figure out is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKCvf8E7V1g - Look at my previous post - it's basically a Rich Guy saying we need to Tax Rich Guys.  Well that fits with the Leftist agenda - except that they KNOW they're not going to do it, because THEY don't pay taxes.