Talkshop readers will remember that as well as his work on modelling solar activity, Rick Salvador also built a planetary model to predict variation in Earth’s Length of Day (LOD). The model uses 13 frequencies derives from planetary and lunar motion to replicate changes in Earth’s spin rate.
Rick has retired from modelling now, so this is the final update on the model’s performance. The IERS LOD database was changed in early 2020, so the model performance update ends there. Over the last 4 years, Rick found that to keep it on track, he needed to add a -0.0006 second correction in June each year. The necessity for this is as yet unexplained and comments on possible reasons are encouraged.
Here’s a plot showing the original model in red, the model with the June -0.0006″ corrections in blue, and the observed LOD data in green.
I asked Rick if he had included a term for the 1799 year De Ropp cycle of Lunar variation and he hadn’t. He kindly took the trouble to add it in and got this result back to the earliest LOD estimates going back to 1630AD. The fit is quite good, with perhaps the hint of a ~200yr residual.
On behalf of everyone at the Talkshop, I’d like to thank Rick for the superb work he has done to advance the solar-planetary osciallation theory (SPOT). His 2013 solar activity prediction paper stands out as a landmark in the study of solar system dynamics, which is standing the test of time well. We wish him all the best for a long and enjoyable retirement with his family.
St Vincent Eruption. Source DW, fair use, low resolution image to identify the subject.
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The volcano on the Caribbean Island of St Vincent has erupted. Cruise liners and Ferries are rushing to the scene to evacuate people caught by the eruption – but people are not allowed to board the cruise liners until they receive a Covid vaccination.
Caribbean’s St Vincent island volcano erupts after 16,000 people evacuated
Posted Yesterday at 1:37am, updated Yesterday at 2:03am
An explosive eruption of the La Soufriere volcano in the Caribbean has rocked the island of St Vincent following mandatory evacuation orders from the local government.
More than 16,000 residents had been evacuated as volcanic activity increased ahead of the eruption, which took place on Friday morning local time.
Evacuees have been given temporary homes on cruise ships and in safer parts of the island.
…
Evacuees told to get vaccinated
The new eruption followed mandatory evacuation orders issued on Thursday for people who lived near the volcano.
The pandemic could hamper evacuation efforts.
Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said in a press conference that people had to be vaccinated if they went aboard a cruise ship or were granted temporary refuge on another island.
He said two Royal Caribbean cruise ships were expected to arrive by Friday and a third one in the coming days, as well as two Carnival cruise ships by Friday.
I don’t blame the rescuers – they are doing the right thing, putting their very expensive ships in danger to rescue people. Volcanic ash could easily cause millions of dollars worth of damage just by landing on the ships, or by getting sucked into the engine air intakes. So they deserve recognition for their courage and compassion.
What I blame is the world’s obsession with Covid.
In normal circumstances people are just evacuated from a deadly disaster zones, nobody refuses anyone because they might be sick. Sick people are given medical attention if required.
But because the world has become obsessed with a disease which kills up to 1% of victims, there is a real possibility that people fleeing a natural disaster will be told they have to stay and die, unless they receive an experimental and potentially life threatening medication.
As I said, not the rescuers fault – they are the meat in the sandwich. If they don’t insist on vaccination, their reward for compassion and heroism could be to be stuck in the ocean, nobody willing to take the evacuated islanders.
But the other islands accepting the refugees and insisting on vaccination should have a good hard look in the mirror. By all means keep the rescued people in isolation. But putting rescuers in a position where they feel they have to refuse help to people fleeing a deadly disaster who have not received the Covid jab, even people at high risk of severe complications from the vaccine – in my opinion that is just wrong.
The following is a video from DW.
Update (EW): Click here to see a speech from Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, saying that people who are not vaccinated will not be accepted by other countries (almost exactly one hour into the interview, 59:05).
“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
Statistician Regina Nuzzo summarizes the problem:
“This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. In today’s environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept ‘reasonable’ outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it.”
Psychologists Richard Simmons et al. find that researcher bias can have a profound influence on the outcome of a study. Such ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ include choices about which variables to include, which data to include, which comparisons to make, and which analysis methods to use. Each of these choices may be reasonable, but when added together they allow for researchers to extract statistical significance or other meaningful information out of almost any data set. Researchers making necessary choices about data collection and analysis believe that they are making the correct, or at least reasonable, choices. But their bias will influence those choices in ways that researchers may not be aware of. Further, researchers may simply be using the techniques that work – meaning they give the results the researcher wants.
The objective of scientific research is to find out what is really true, not just verify our biases. If a community of scientists has a diversity of perspectives and different biases, then the checks and balances in the scientific process including peer review will eventually counter the biases of individuals. Sometimes this is true—but often this does not happen quickly or smoothly. Not only can poor data and wrong ideas survive, but good ideas can be suppressed.
However, when biases caused by motivated reasoning and career pressures become entrenched in the institutions that support science – the professional societies, scientific journals, universities and funding agencies – then that subfield of science may be led astray for decades.
Biases caused by a consensus building process
Consensus is viewed as a proxy for truth in many discussions of science. A consensus formed by the independent and free deliberations of many is a strong indicator of truth. However, a consensus can only be trusted to the extent that individuals are free to disagree with it.
A scientific argument can evolve prematurely into a ruling theory if cultural forces are sufficiently strong and aligned in the same direction. Premature theories enforced by an explicit consensus building process harm scientific progress because of the questions that don’t get asked and the investigations that aren’t undertaken. Nuzzio (2015) refers to this as ‘hypothesis myopia.’
If the objective of scientific research is to obtain truth and avoid error, how might a consensus seeking process introduce bias into the science and increase the chances for error?
‘Confirmation bias’ is a well-known psychological principle that connotes the seeking or interpretation of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or an existing hypothesis. Confirmation bias usually refers to unwitting selectivity in the acquisition and interpretation of evidence.
Philosopher Thomas Kelly (2005) provides the following insight into confirmation bias. As more and more peers weigh in on a given issue, the proportion of the total evidence which consists of higher order psychological evidence of what other people believe increases, and the proportion of the total evidence which consists of first order evidence decreases. Kelly concludes that over time, this invisible hand process tends to bestow a certain competitive advantage to our prior beliefs with respect to confirmation and disconfirmation.
Allen et al. (2020) demonstrate how dependence, pressure, and polarization can force a consensus, making reliance on consensus as an indicator of truth unreliable. As a result, a consensus can only be trusted to the extent that individuals are free to disagree with it, without repression or reprisal. Similarly, when strong incentives favor affirmation of a position, a consensus affirming it becomes almost inevitable, and therefore all but meaningless.
Communication theorist Jean Goodwin argues that once the consensus claim was made, scientists involved in the ongoing IPCC process had reasons not just to consider the scientific evidence, but also to consider the possible effect of their statements on their ability to defend the consensus claim.
The IPCC’s consensus-building process arguably promotes groupthink. ‘Groupthink’ is a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values. Janis (1972) describes eight symptoms of groupthink:
illusion of invulnerability
collective rationalization
belief in inherent morality
stereotyped views of out-groups
direct pressure on dissenters
self-censorship
illusion of unanimity
self-appointed mind guards
Many defenders of the IPCC consensus − both scientists and consensus entrepreneurs − show many if not all of these symptoms.
Thomas Gold (1989) discussed the dangers that ‘herd behavior’ poses for scientists, potentially leading to an inertia-driven persistence of false consensus opinion within the sciences. While herd instinct has value in sociological behavior, it has been a disaster in science − in science what we generally want is diversity. When people pursue the same avenue all together, they tend to shut out other avenues, and they are not always on the right ones.
It is not just the herd instinct in the individuals that is of concern. If support from peers and moral and financial consequences are at stake, then staying with the herd is the successful policy for the individual; however, it is not the successful policy for the pursuit of science. Mental herd behavior, even if it does not actually put a clamp upon free thinking, insidiously applies pressure to follow the fashion. The institutions that support of science − financial support, the journals, the judgment of referees, the invitations to conferences, professional recognition − are all influenced by herd behavior.
Economist William Butos (2015) characterizes the IPCC as a ‘Big Player’ in science in that it possesses all of the attributes characteristic of Big Players in markets: bigness in terms of influence, insensitivity to the usual constraints, and discretion in its ability to promote a favored direction of research. This characterization of the IPCC as ‘Big Player’ is similar to economist Richard Tol’s characterization of the IPCC as a knowledge monopoly. The IPCC’s influence in climate science is pervasive, allowing it to largely ignore the usual scientific constraints on the acceptance of hypotheses. Professional success in climate science has become more tied to the acceptance of the IPCC’s pronouncements than with the exploration of contrary possibilities.
The existence of the IPCC as a ‘big player’ and a ‘knowledge monopoly’ on climate change can lead to premature canonization of IPCC conclusions. Premature canonization refers to widespread scientific belief in a false or incomplete conclusion, which leads to suppression masquerading as rejection. Suppression occurs when the fear of social sanctions prevents ideas from being explored or empirical findings from being presented in scientific or public forums. In science, rejection occurs when an idea has been explored and the evidence has been found wanting. A classic, relatively recent case of premature canonization involves the scientific identification of causes of ulcers.
So what are the implications of these concerns for the IPCC’s consensus on human-caused climate change? Cognitive biases in the context of an institutionalized consensus building process have arguably resulted in the consensus becoming increasingly confirmed, and even canonized, in a self-reinforcing way. An extended group of scientists derive their confidence in the consensus in a second-hand manner from the institutional authority of the IPCC and the emphatic nature in which the consensus is portrayed. This ‘invisible hand’ marginalizes skeptical perspectives. Overconfident assertions by the ‘Big Player’ take away the motivation for scientists to challenge the consensus, particularly when they can expect to be called a ‘denier’ for their efforts and see their chances diminish for professional recognition and research funding.
The consensus building process acts to amplify personal biases, and marginalizes disagreement from either a majority opinion or the opinion of the loudest or most motivated person in the room. One can only speculate on the magnitude and importance of the biases introduced into climate science by the IPCC’s consensus seeking process.
While browsing Twitter in incognito mode, a comic book style rendering that looked like Judith Curry caught my eye:
It’s from a comic book called Discourses of Climate Delay that looks like it was just published by a German artist named Céline Keller. He has a Twitter account and likes to tweet a lot about climate in English and German. You can download it as a PDF for free. It has lots of comic book style drawings of various climate figures and world leaders and they are all labeled so you can tell who they are. They’re not poorly drawn, but it can be hard to capture an exact likeness in a drawing. The theme seems to be pretty close to that of Michael Mann’s latest book, The New Climate War. He says he got a lot of his information from Desmogblog’s database and it shows. It slimes people like Judith Curry and Bjorn Lomborg while lionizing the likes of Greta Thunberg and Stefan Rahmstorf. There are lots of obscure government and industry people.
At the end of it he has a bingo card of all his topics which I’m not going to list since they are not copy and pasteable. Something that I did not see is any mention of Michael Shellenberger. This seems in keeping with the climate alarmists’ best efforts to ignore the arguments made in his major bestselling book, Apocalypse Never. It’s interesting that Keller and Mann are perfectly willing to attack Lomborg who also has a new book out, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. I suspect that Lomborg’s writing has gotten a little repetitive and old hat by now and the alarmists are used to responding to it with well honed talking points. Shellenberger has brought up a lot of new ideas that they can’t handle and have no way of dealing with.
The battle to sell replacements for gas boilers, likely to be unavailable new in the relatively near future (2030?) in the UK, is on. As this microwave option appears we ask what, if anything, is wrong with existing electric boilers? Needless to say, anything electric can’t be more ‘low carbon’ than its electricity source, which is usually 40-60% gas in the UK. But using electricity for heating water instead of making hydrogen has some logic to it. – – – A new heating technology has emerged from under the radar as a potential alternative to both heat pumps and gas boilers in the quest for low carbon heating, reports H&V News.
Heat Wayv, a UK energy technology company, has unveiled the world’s first microwave boiler intended as a zero-emissions replacement for gas boilers, with a view to the phase-out of natural gas in new-build homes from 2025.
The company originally developed the microwave technology as a portable cooking device for military use and has now applied it to the heating of water.
Co-founder Phil Stevens said: “The end of the [natural] gas boiler is inevitable and scheduled. But the proposed replacement technologies do not work for consumers as they are either too expensive to install or too expensive to run. We looked for a clean technology where the boiler would cost the consumer the same to buy, same to install and same to run as a gas boiler.”
Mr Stevens and co-founder Paul Atherton believe that it can provide a lower-cost and simpler alternative to heat pumps for use in new-build homes, while at the same time being straightforward to fit in existing homes.
This they believe gives the technology a dual advantage over gas boilers – its lack of carbon monoxide emissions and electric power make it a compelling option for boiler replacement now, while ultimately it offers a more practical and lower cost alternative to the hydrogen grid, currently being proposed.
Mr Atherton said: “We believe this technology offers a more practical solution than hydrogen, with considerably less investment than the billions hydrogen will cost, but even if the hydrogen grid does become a reality, for the next 30 years or however long it takes this is a perfect bridging technology.”
The company is in advanced talks with housebuilders to trial the technology in a real-world setting next year, and then to optimise it with a plan to sell the boilers through wholesalers in 2024.
The concept brings with it a host of claimed benefits beyond its plug and play installation: it is 96% efficient; it is silent in operation; installers can be trained on a half-day course and as it is largely based on solid-state components, it is low in maintenance, so will be offered with a ten-year warranty.
The melting rate of the Antarctic ice sheet is mainly controlled by the increase of ocean temperatures surrounding Antarctica. Using a new, higher-resolution climate model simulation, scientists from Utrecht University found a much slower ocean temperature increase compared to current simulations with a coarser resolution. Consequently, the projected sea-level rise in 100 years is about 25% lower than expected from the current simulations. These results are published today in the journal Science Advances.
Estimates for future sea-level rise are based on a large ensemble of climate model simulations. The output from these simulations helps to understand future climate change and its effects on the sea level. Climate researchers continually aim to improve these models, for example by using a much higher spatial resolution that takes more details into account. “High-resolution simulations can determine the ocean circulation much more accurately,” says Prof. Henk Dijkstra. Together with his Ph.D. candidate René van Westen, he has been studying ocean currents in high-resolution climate model simulations over the past few years.
Ocean eddies
The new high-resolution model takes into account ocean eddy processes. An eddy is a large (10-200 km) swirling and turbulent feature in the ocean circulation, which contributes to the transport of heat and salt. Adding ocean eddies into the simulation leads to a more realistic representation of the ocean temperatures surrounding Antarctica, which is key for determining the mass loss of the Antarctic ice sheet. “The Antarctic ice sheet is surrounded by ice shelves which reduce the flow of land ice into the ocean,” Van Westen explains. “Higher ocean temperatures around Antarctica increase the melting of these ice shelves, resulting in an acceleration of land ice into the ocean and consequently leading to more sea-level rise.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/a9m61TsJDa0?color=whiteComparison of the new high-resolution model (left) with the previously used low-resolution one (right). Credit: Utrecht University
The current climate model simulations, which do not take ocean eddies into account, project that the ocean temperatures around Antarctica are increasing under climate change. The new high-resolution simulation shows quite different behavior and some regions near Antarctica even cool under climate change. “These regions appear to be more resilient under climate change,” says Van Westen. Dijkstra adds: “One obtains a very different temperature response due to ocean-eddy effects.”
Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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