Posted on 05/10/2021 5:56:19 AM PDT by MtnClimber
As readers at this site are well aware, the field of climate “science” and alarmism is subject to an extraordinary degree of orthodoxy enforcement, where all information supporting the official narrative gets enthusiastically promoted, while all information disagreeing with the official narrative gets suppressed or attacked. For just one recent example of the latter, see the Wall Street Journal editorial in the current weekend edition reporting on a bogus Facebook “fact check” of the Journal’s recent review of Steven Koonin’s new book “Unsettled.”
In this context, an article just out on May 6 in the journal Science is truly remarkable. The article is titled “Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt.” It has the byline of Martin Enserink, Science’s international news editor. Science has a long history of publishing every sort of climate alarmism, and of being an unreceptive forum for anything expressing any sort of skepticism, let alone alleging fraud in claims of climate alarm. Something serious must be going on here.
To get the significance of the recent developments, it is important to understand where assertions of “ocean acidification” fit into the field of climate alarm. The use of fossil fuels by humans generates CO2 that goes into the atmosphere. CO2 is a “greenhouse gas,” and many models project that increasing levels of CO2 will warm the atmosphere in some significant amount. Activists then assert many harmful effects from the hypothetical warming — not just hot days and heat waves, but everything from melting ice, rising seas, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, you name it. All of these asserted effects arise from the initial step of atmospheric warming.
But what if the warming doesn’t happen, or turns out to be far less than the fear-mongers have projected? That’s where “ocean acidification” comes in. “Ocean acidification” is the one allegedly harmful effect of rising atmospheric CO2 that does not stem initially from warming temperatures. Instead, the idea is that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will somewhat increase the level of CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which in turn will lower the pH of the oceans. How much? Some projections suggest at the extreme end that average ocean pH may go down from a current 8.1 or so, all the way to maybe about 7.75 by 2100. If you know anything about this subject, or maybe took high school chemistry, you will know that pH of 7 is neutral, lower than 7 is acidic, and above 7 is basic. Thus a pH of 8.1 is not acidic at all, but rather (a little) basic; and a pH of 7.75 is somewhat less basic. The fact that anyone would try to apply the scary term of “ocean acidification” to this small projected shift toward neutrality already shows you that somebody is trying to manipulate the ignorant.
And besides, what’s wrong with a pH of 7.75? After all, pH of 7 is completely neutral — even if ocean pH went all the way down to that level (and not even the worst alarmists are claiming that it will), how could that possibly be harmful to any living thing?
Into this mix then jumped a group of researchers at James Cook University. JCU is an Australian university known as a center for studying marine biology. It is located at a fairly remote place along the coast in Northeast Australia, near the Great Barrier Reef. In about 2009, JCU researchers — led by Philip Munday and Danielle Dixson — began publishing a series of papers asserting that ocean acidification was causing a wide range of striking and detrimental effects on fish behaviors. Among other claimed results of the research were that fish subjected to somewhat less basic water would lose their ability to smell predators and become attracted towards the scent of predators; would become hyper-active; would loose their tendency to automatically swim either left or right; and other such things. As to the significance of their research, in a 2014 report for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Munday and Dixson warned that their work showed that projected “ocean acidification” could have “profound consequences for marine diversity” and fisheries.
If you have any bullshit radar at all, I assume that it has already been set off with loud alarms and flashing red lights. But of course, all of the Munday/Dixson papers sailed through peer review and were quickly published at the most “prestigious” journals.
Yet somehow the Munday/Dixson work was so preposterous that it eventually attracted the interest of a group of young scientists who thought that the results just could not possibly be right. Over the period 2016 to 2019 a group of seven researchers led by Timothy Clark and Fredrik Jutfeld attempted to replicate the principal results of Munday and Dixson on fish behavior. Clark, Jutfeld, et al., published the results of their work in January 2020 in Nature, with the title “Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes.” The bottom line: they could not replicate the claimed effects on fish behavior at all. From the abstract of the Clark, Jutfeld, et al., article:
Coral reef fishes are predicted to be especially susceptible to end-of-century ocean acidification on the basis of several high-profile papers that have reported profound behavioural and sensory impairments—for example, complete attraction to the chemical cues of predators under conditions of ocean acidification. Here, we comprehensively and transparently show that—in contrast to previous studies—end-of-century ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes. . . .
The “high profile” papers referred to are some of the Munday/Dixson works.
The dueling results have apparently created quite the schism among marine biologists, at some point leading the journal Science to put its own international editor on the job of reporting on the controversy. The Science piece is fairly long, but well worth a read. Among much else, there is this:
[I]n August 2020, Clark and three others in the group . . . asked three funders that together spent millions on Dixson’s and Munday’s work—the Australian Research Council (ARC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to investigate possible fraud in 22 papers. The request, which they shared with a Science reporter, rests on what they say is evidence of manipulation in publicly available raw data files for two papers, one published in Science, the other in Nature Climate Change, combined with remarkably large and “statistically impossible” effects from CO2 reported in many of the other papers. They also provided testimony from former members of the Dixson and Munday labs, some of whom monitored Dixson’s activities and concluded she made up data.
Science also took the step of asking multiple independent scientists not affiliated with Clark to review the allegations and comment. The result:
[M]ultiple scientists and data experts unconnected to the Clark group who reviewed the case at Science’s request flagged a host of problems in the two [Munday/Dixson] data sets, and one of them found what he says are serious irregularities in the data for additional papers co-authored by Munday.
Over at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, they publish a piece on May 7 by Peter Ridd commenting on this situation. Have you heard of Peter Ridd? Ridd was a professor at James Cook University, and among other things head of the Physics Department and head of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at that institution. He was known for work on the Great Barrier Reef, particularly for challenging the prevailing narrative that the GBR was in serious decline due to global warming. In 2016 Ridd was disciplined and then fired by JCU, which cited critical comments he had made about the work of colleagues. The comments at issue included telling Sky News that bodies like the Australian Institute of Marine Science "can no longer be trusted" and saying that many scientists examining the health of the Great Barrier Reef were "emotionally attached" and "not objective". Ridd sued JCU over the firing, and recovered a judgment of A$1.2 million at trial. That judgment was then reversed on appeal. On February 21 Ridd’s case was accepted for review by Australia’s High Court (equivalent to our Supreme Court).
It’s now looking like Ridd’s prior remarks may turn out to be a severe understatement as to the level of scientific corruption at JCU.
And then there is the level of corruption in climate science more generally. There is plenty more to be found if researchers like Clark et al. get sent to the right places. I have called the alterations of temperatures in the historical records kept by the U.S. government “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time”; yet somehow, the manipulation of those data have so far escaped any kind of thorough independent examination or audit, even during the four years of the supposedly skeptical Trump administration. The day will come, but it may be a while.
Earth Axis tilts slightly away from sun
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3877075/posts
Earth Enters Unknown as Magnetic North Pole Continues Push Toward Russia, Crosses Greenwich Meridian
Sputniknews.com ^ | 15:08 13.12.2019 (updated 15:42 13.12.2019) | Staff
posted in the Free Republic Aggregate conservative news site
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3800727/posts
South Pole Reports
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3936325/posts
Posted on 12/13/2019, 4:22:18 PM by Red Badger
Earlier this year, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Geological Survey (BGS) were forced to update the World Magnetic Model a year ahead of schedule due to the speed with which the magnetic north pole is shifting out of the Canadian Arctic and toward Russia’s Siberia.
Deep solar minimum on the verge of an historic milestone
wattsupwiththat.com ^ | December 12, 2019 | by Paul Dorian
Posted on 12/13/2019, 3:17:04 PM by Red Badger Posted in the Free Republic aggregate news site http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3800719/posts
Solar minimum is a normal part of the 11-year sunspot cycle, but the last one and the current one have been far deeper than most. One of the consequences of a solar minimum is a reduction of solar storms and another is the intensification of cosmic rays. The just ended solar cycle 24 turned out to be one of the weakest in more than a century – continuing a weakening trend that began in the 1980’s – and, if the latest forecasts are correct, the next solar cycle will be the weakest in more than 200 years.
One of the natural impacts of decreasing solar activity is the weakening of the ambient solar wind and its magnetic field which, in turn, allows more and more cosmic rays to penetrate the solar system. Galactic cosmic rays are high-energy particles originating from outside the solar system that can impact the Earth’s atmosphere. Our first line of defense from cosmic rays comes from the sun as its magnetic field and the solar wind combine to create a ‘shield’ that fends off cosmic rays attempting to enter the solar system. The shielding action of the sun is strongest during solar maximum and weakest during solar minimum with the weakening magnetic field and solar wind. The intensity of cosmic rays varies globally by about 15% over a solar cycle because of changes in the strength of the solar wind, which carries a weak magnetic field into the heliosphere, partially shielding Earth from low-energy galactic charged particles.
NEWLY PUBLISHED SCIENTIFIC PAPER TEARS GLOBAL WARMING AND THE IPCC TO SHREDS
Electro verse.net ^ | Dec 11, 2019
Posted on 12/17/2019, 4:54:46 PM by 11th_VA
http://www.freerepublic/com/focus/f-news/3801618/posts
A scientific paper entitled “An Overview of Scientific Debate of Global Warming and Climate Change” has recently come out of the University of Karachi, Pakistan. The paper’s author, Prof. Shamshad Akhtar delves into earth’s natural temperature variations of the past 1000 years, and concludes that any modern warming trend has been hijacked by political & environmental agendas, and that the science (tackled below) has been long-ignored and at times deliberately manipulated.
... Pro human induced global warming scientists exaggerate the contribution of carbon dioxide as a major greenhouse gas in absorbing long wave earth’s radiation. The fact is water vapor is the single largest atmospheric greenhouse gas (2% by volume), Carbon dioxide is second (0.0385% by volume).
Water vapor contributes 95% to the greenhouse effect, all other greenhouse gases combined contribute only 5%. Furthermore, the man-made portion of carbon dioxide contributes only 0.117% to the greenhouse effect.
The IPCC does not consider water vapor a greenhouse gas in its reports.
In addition, water vapor absorbs in a much wider band of long wave radiation (4-8 micrometer and 12-70 micrometer bands), whereas Carbon dioxide absorbs in narrow bands (13-16 micrometer) and ozone absorbs in a much smaller narrow band (9-10 micrometer). Thus, water vapor absorbs in a much wider wave length band, it has the single largest greenhouse effect among all the greenhouse gases.
One of the best, and most entertaining books on the subject of the global warming scam is Christopher Horner’s book “Red Hot Lies”.
Just an excellent book. Even though it is now a bit older, NOTHING has changed about it.
I have also long been a huge fan of Lord Christopher Monckton, who physically looks like he was selected directly from casting central in a search for an eccentric English Lord, but is spot on an unassailable.
The fact that the Left DESPISES him with a white-hot burning passion, and ridicules and marginalizes him at every turn should tell you he is DEFINITELY over the target. I can provide you with some good links to his lectures, which are not only spot on scientifically, but are highly entertaining in his unique and self-effacing British style...:)
Thus, Pi should be 4.
+++++
Well yes, that would make cutting up a Pi a lot easier but you have to be realistic. A recent Government Study concluded that making Pi equal to 3.000000000000 would save the Taxpayers $Billions if not $Trillions per year. Even the brilliant Nancy PiLousy agreed and has submitted a Bill to quantify the change in the law.
Carbon dioxide is a very effective orchestrated crisis for the left to gain control of the means of production, the use of energy.
I am very familiar with Monkton. Actually, I’ve been arguing this thing on the internet since 2006. I started a thread on it at one site back in 2007 that ended up with almost 7,000 posts.
I said way back then that the primary function of this nonsense is to convince the “people” to accept government control and regulation of CO2 output, because all human endeavors produce it. If the government can control it they can use it to control every aspect of your life, right down to how much physical exercise you get in.
And that is ALL it is.
One of my treasures from my late father is a series of books about the coming ice age.
It is supposed to start soon
Like I want any of my tax money going to the United Nations to fill the bottomless pockets of kleptocrats in Europe and elsewhere in the world...
SPIT.
LOL - perfect
>>Thus, Pi should be 4. That’s how Psyience works, not a lot of reason, thought or even consideration of how Pi is actually used. But it “feels” good, and that’s all that matters to Psyientists all over the world.<<
It is a bit moot as math is rassist according to social psyentists.
Well thought out ... which means I just need to buy more Pi at Sam’s Club next holiday season, as we are only getting 3.0 slices instead of 4.
I like your reasoning.
I had most of those. Do you happen to have one called’ ______, Famine and Freeze. I owned and can not remember the first if the three, but it started with an ‘F’ like the other two.
The one I had was from Iben Browning.
I remember playing GI Joe as Dad listened to it on a tape.
Over the years, I dig it out on occasion.
I think this is the book you are thinking about.
Yep that’s it. Thanks. That has been driving me nuts for years. Bryson Reid from University of Wisconsin had a book out at the time that I had too. In the early 90’s he became one of the biggest AGW pushers.
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