Category Archives: Uncategorized

by Patrick J Michaels

Earlier this year, Eric Kaufmann of the University of London published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think-tank set up to do research that is forbidden in today’s academy. His finding of rampant left-sided political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the Academy — and discrimination against anyone right-of-center — qualifies as forbidden scholarship.

Continue reading →

by Thomas Anderl

Simple models are formulated to identify the essentials of the natural climate variabilities, concentrating on the readily observable and simplest description. The results will be presented in a series of five articles. This first part shows an attempt to determine the climate role of CO2 from the past. Observations on 400 Mio. years of paleoclimate are found to well constrain the compound universal climate role of CO2, represented by a simple formula.

Continue reading →

by Judith Curry

The concerning saga of the creation, enforcement and collapse of a ‘consensus’ on Covid-19 origins.

Continue reading →

by Judith Curry

Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate change — more realistic scenarios make for better policy. 

Continue reading →

by S. Stanley Young and Warren Kindzierski

Climate Etc. recently carried several insightful posts about How we fool ourselves. One of the posts – Part II: Scientific consensus building – was right on the money given our experience! The post pointed out that… ‘researcher degrees of freedom’… allows for researchers to extract statistical significance or other meaningful information out of almost any data set. Along similar lines, we offer some thoughts on how others try to fool us using statistics (aka how to lie with statistics); others being epidemiologists and government bureaucrats. 

Continue reading →

by Alan Longhurst

   “Never before in 1000 years the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as the Gulf Stream System, has been as weak as in the last decades“.  

Continue reading →

by Judith Curry

Reviews of new books by Steve Koonin, Matthew Kahn and Marc Morano.

Continue reading →

by Judith Curry

“Is the road to scientific hell paved with good intentions?” – political psychologist Philip Tetlock (1994)

Continue reading →

by Judith Curry

“Like a magnetic field that pulls iron filings into alignment, a powerful cultural belief is aligning multiple sources of scientific bias in the same direction. – policy scientist Daniel Sarewitz

Continue reading →

by Roger Caiazza

Environmental justice organizations are currently a major driver of environmental regulation in New York. A new report “The Fossil Fuel End Game, A frontline vision to retire New York City’s peaker plants by 2030” illustrates the campaign strategy they are using to shut down peaking power plants in New York City.  Unfortunately their claims are based more on emotion than fact.

Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

I thought it was time for an update of my original analysis of 28 June 2020. As I wrote then, the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden is of great interest, as it is one of very few advanced nations where no lockdown order that heavily restricted people’s movements and other basic freedoms was imposed. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

 Introduction

Many people, myself included, thought that in the many regions where COVID-19 infections were consistently reducing during the summer, indicating that the applicable herd immunity threshold had apparently been crossed, it was unlikely that a major second wave would occur. This thinking has been proved wrong. In this article I give an explanation of why I think major second waves have happened. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

Key points

• A new variant, B.1.1.7, of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has recently spread rapidly in England
• The public health agency’s best estimate of B.1.1.7’s weekly growth rate advantage is 1.51x
• They mis-convert this in a reproduction number ratio of 1.47; converting appropriately gives a ratio of 1.25
• Confident claims by the UK government scientific advisers that the higher growth of B.1.1.7 is due to increased transmissibility are misplaced; it could be partly of wholly due to other factors
• 1.1.7 has not shown a greater growth rate advantage than two previous variants did, both of which are now thought to have no greater transmissibility than previously existing variants
• There is little evidence that B.1.1.7 is more virulent, or likely to be resistant to existing vaccines

Continue reading →

by Judith Curry

I just finished reading an article entitled Asymptomatic Spread Revisited. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

An interesting new paper by Marc Lipsitch and co-authors, “Cross-reactive memory T cells and herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2”, has recently been published.[1] It discusses immunological and epidemiological aspects and implications of pre-existing cross-reactive adaptive immune system memory arising from previous exposure to circulating common cold coronaviruses. They argue that key potential impacts of cross- reactive T cell memory are already incorporated into epidemiological models based on data of transmission dynamics, particularly with regard to their implications for herd immunity. I believe that they are mistaken on the herd immunity point, as I will show in this article. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

I showed in my May 10th article Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought that inhomogeneity within a population in the susceptibility and in the social-connectivity related infectivity of individuals would reduce, in my view probably very substantially, the herd immunity threshold (HIT), beyond which an epidemic goes into retreat. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

Much fuss has been made in the UK, not least by teachers’ unions, about recommencing physical school attendance. As this issue applies to many countries, I thought it worth highlighting research findings in Europe. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

I showed in my May 10th article Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought that inhomogeneity within a population in the susceptibility and in the social-connectivity related infectivity of individuals would reduce, in my view probably very substantially, the herd immunity threshold (HIT), beyond which an epidemic goes into retreat. I opined, based on my modelling, that the HIT probably lay somewhere between 7% and 24%, and that evidence from Stockholm County suggested it was around 17% there, and had been reached. Mounting evidence supports my reasoning.^[1]

I particularly want to highlight an important paper published on July 24th “Herd immunity thresholds estimated from unfolding epidemics” (Aguas et al.).^[2] The author team is much the same as that of the earlier theoretical paper (Gomes et al.^[3]) that prompted my May 10th article. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

The course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden is of great interest, as it is one of very few advanced nations where no lockdown order that heavily restricted people’s movements and other basic freedoms was imposed. As there has been much comment, some of it ill-informed, on how the COVID-19 epidemic has developed in Sweden, but relatively little detailed analysis published in English, it is worth exploring what their excellent publicly-available data reveal. Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

Key points about the recent Nature paper by Flaxman and other Imperial College modellers

Continue reading →

by Roland Hirsch

Mass spectrometry is essential for research in climate science.

Continue reading →

By Nic Lewis

Introduction

I showed in my last article that inhomogeneity within a population in the susceptibility and infectivity of individuals would reduce the herd immunity threshold, in my view probably very substantially, and that evidence from Stockholm County appeared to support that view. In this article I will first provide other evidence pointing to such population inhomogeneity being very considerable. I will then go on to consider how the overshoot of infections beyond the herd immunity threshold could be reduced. Continue reading →