Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #643
2 hours ago Guest Blogger 1 Comment
The Week That Was: 2025 05 24 (May 24, 2025)
Brought to You by SEPP (
www.SEPP.org)
Quote of the Week: “It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.”— Richard Feynman
Number of the Week: From 27% to 20%
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: TWTW begins with another effort to smear SEPP founder S. Fred Singer with Inuendo and Insinuation rather than trying to find facts. TWTW discusses an effort by Ross McKitrick to correct past errors in the use of statistical methods and develop a statistical method for estimating a human cause to some of the temperature change over the past 120 years. TWTW discusses a paper by Kesten Green and Willie Soon that shows that global climate models are unsuitable for policy making. TWTW concludes with a brief comment by Ole Humlum that 30 years is too short a period for understanding causes of climate change.
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Inuendo and Insinuation: Physical science is built on physical evidence gathered from observations and experiments. Controlled experiments are preferred, but the ultimate judge is observation. One may speculate on the meaning of the evidence and how it fits with other evidence, but one must always recognize the physical evidence in making judgements. Unfortunately, many people who engage in “science” politicize it by making claims against physical science that are not supported by physical evidence. Such was the case in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt (2010).
The authors of Merchants of Doubt strongly criticized physical scientists Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer, and Robert Jastrow who questioned claims about secondhand tobacco smoke, dangerous human-caused global warming, and other scientific fads of the day. For example, Fred Singer never smoked, but questioned studies such as those that claimed that secondhand smoke caused cavities in the teeth of infants. He did not doubt that frequently inhaling hot tobacco smoke could be unhealthful. Yet, he was accused of taking money from tobacco companies without any physical evidence. The book claimed that the physical evidence was in the footnoted references, but it did not exist.
Oreskes was rewarded for her claims with a professorship in the Department of History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Harvard. Such is the power of Inuendo and Insinuation and the lack of scientific integrity in major academic institutions.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/26/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-643/
