by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Silent Sun
The BBC has a very nice article Is our sun falling silent? Excerpt:
“I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.
“If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he says.
This solar lull is baffling scientists, because right now the Sun should be awash with activity.
Freezing is the new warming
RealClearPolitics has an interesting article Freezing is the new warming, that summarizes the current state of the public debate on climate change. Excerpts:
Or try refuting global warming. Temperatures have stopped warming for more than a decade? That’s just a temporary “pause” in the warming that we just know is going to come roaring back any day now. Antarctic ice is growing? That’s actually caused by the melting of ice, don’t you know. A vicious cold snap that sets record low temperatures? That’s just because the North Pole is actually warming. So if the winter is warm, that’s global warming, but if the winter is cold, that’s global warming, too. If sea ice is disappearing, that’s global warming, but if sea ice is increasing, that’s global warming.
Now we can see what they mean when the warmthers say that global warming is supported by an ironclad scientific consensus. The theory is so irrefutable that it’s unfalsifiable!
Which is to say that it has become a cognitive spaghetti bowl full of ad hoc rationalizations, rather than a genuine scientific hypothesis.
Survey
Mike Haseler (Scottish Sceptic) has prepared a carefully crafted survey of professional attitudes on AGW, and the target audience is YOU:
The url is:
The aim of the survey is to understand the nature and background of those interested in the climate debate online. It will provide an invaluable insight into the education and work experience of participants, test the relevance of politics in forming views and assess employment and social factors for their relationship with views on climate.
I’ve taken the survey, it takes about 5 minutes. I will be very interested to see the results, I hope that each of you will participate and take the survey.
Science is broken(?)
Cracked has a very interesting article 6 shocking studies prove science is totally broken. This paper describes peer reviewed journal articles that study scientific practices in various fields. The six topics are:
#6 A shocking amont of medical research is totally bullshit. I have highlighted this issue previously at CE
#5 Many scientists still don’t understand math
#4 . . . And they don’t understand statistics either. This one definitely resonates in the climate community.
#3 Scientists have nearly unlimited room to manipulate data. Bingo
#2 The science community still won’t listen to women. Hmmm . . .
#1 It’s all about the money.
The summary statement is this:
Just to be clear: It’s not that you should suddenly stop trusting science in general — without science it would be impossible to distinguish charlatans from people who have actual wizard powers. But there’s a big difference between accepting scientific consensus and just blindly believing everything said by a guy in a white lab coat.
Invisible(?) Judith Curry
Donna Laframboise has a thoughtful article on my congressional testimony The Invisible Judith Curry. She is concerned that my testimony has gotten no MSM attention. As far as I can tell, the whole hearing got no MSM attention. And very little blogospheric attention. A little attention on twitter (mainly Mann’s anti-science thing), and critiques that my verbal delivery is ‘boring’ even if on target.
The article did make me think about my ‘visibility’. I am not looking for public visibility, rather I am hoping to influence the integrity of scientific research, the direction of scientific research (i.e. more natural variability), a better incorporation of uncertainty at the science policy interface. This is mostly behind the scenes stuff (i.e. outside of the MSM, public eye): blogging, some tweeting, occasional op-eds, presentations to scientific groups, occasional congressional testimony. Is this an effective strategy? Who knows, but it is the one I am comfortable with.
Re my testimony, it is my written testimony (not the verbal remarks) that I expect will have some influence on the EPW committee. We’ll see. I felt that my previous testimony to the House (last April) did influence that Committee.
“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” – Leonardo da Vinci