Last night, the University of East Anglia announced that Phil Jones, a central figure in the e-mails and other documents disclosed last month, would temporarily step aside as head of the Climate Research Unit pending an independent review of the matter. Penn State University has also announced an investigation regarding the conduct of Michael Mann, a PSU climate scientist who also features prominently in the disclosed correspondence. More from the BBC and NYT.
On the commentary front, Reason‘s Ron Bailey thinks the affair is a “hot mess.”
Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and their colleagues around the globe may have fiddled with historical climate data and possibly the peer review process to ensure that publicized temperature trends fit the narrative of man-made global warming—then they emailed each other about it. Now those emails and other documents have been splashed all over the Web. Revelations contained in the leaked emails are roiling the scientific community and the researchers may be in pretty serious trouble. But the real tragedy of the Climategate scandal is that a lack of confidence in climate data will seriously impair mankind’s ability to assess and react properly to a potentially huge problem.
I think his analysis is spot on, and I recommend reading the whole thing.
In other commentary, Megan McArdle has “become considerably more concerned” as she’s dug deeper into what the disclosed documents reveal, and Glenn Reynolds thinks it’s worth reminding ourselves how scientific inquiry is supposed to proceed. Bret Stephens also recommends that we “follow the money” in order to understand some climate researchers’ motivations. After all, if it’s relevant that a given climate “skeptic” received money from an energy company, shouldn’t we care that a climate researcher’s grants increased six-fold as global warming fears rose? I think we should seek to evaluate arguments and analyses independently of the identities and interests of the authors, but what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Finally, in a little side note — both amusing and sad — could the claim that Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 been the result of a typo? Madhav Khandekar thinks so. It appears the real scientific estimate was for 2350.
uh_clem says:
Meagan McArdle:
Hmmm. I wonder if she was reading the comments here yesterday? Anyway, for those who jumped all over my Rorschach comment yesterday, please feel free to excoriate her comment in the same manner. Thank you.
December 2, 2009, 11:55 amzuch says:
They e-mailed each other about “may have [been] fiddl[ing]” with the data?!?!?
As far as “fiddl[ing] with [...] the peer review process”, perhaps they were just trying to forestall this kind of SNAFU….
Cheers,
December 2, 2009, 12:07 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Bah. These temporary steppings-down and investigations are pure public-relations. I will bet ten thousand dollars, with anyone who wishes: nothing will come of this. Whatever investigations occur will fizzle out. I have seen fake scientific scandals fizzle out before, and this has all the earmarks.
The fact is, at least so far, there’s nothing in the emails except scientists wrangling as scientists do. There is NO attempt to suppress legitimate, research-based dissent, only an attempt to suppress fake-scientists who are on the same level as the tobacco-industry-paid cigarette-cancer denialists in the 1960s, fakes who OUGHT to be suppressed, there’s too many of them to allow them to waste the scientists’ time, and no serious scientist should share a platform with them. There is NO attempt to subvert or violate freedom-of-info laws, only an attempt to MINIMALLY COMPLY WITH them in the face of systematic abuse of same. There is NO attempt to present data in a biased way, as, for instance, Iain Murray has accused Professor Mann of doing; only an attempt to present as much data as possible. There is NO attempt to fabricate data, only an attempt to use data less gold-standard than total-hemisphere estimates (which are difficult to obtain) but still adequate (regional data from many different sources).
All the complaints about “what the emails show” are vague, general comments about scientific integrity from people who know no science and from bad-faith propagandists like Glenn Reynolds. If there were anything substantial, we would have heard about it by now.
Well. Ten thousand dollars. If you’re so sure there’s something in this, take me on! Money for nothing, man!
December 2, 2009, 12:11 pmzuch says:
Who thinks that Glenn Reynolds is an authority as to “how scientific inquiry is supposed to proceed”? For one, scientists don’t go “Heh.” at scientific conventions when the presentation strikes their fancy….
Cheers,
December 2, 2009, 12:13 pmlucia says:
Zuch–
December 2, 2009, 12:21 pmJHA linked to the APS, not Reynolds, as the authority for “how scientific inquiry is supposed to proceed”. The APS is a fairly well respected scientific society.
OperationCounterstrike says:
Oh, and there is no attempt to subvert peer-review, only an attempt to PREVENT it from being subverted from with in (see the whole von Storch business).
December 2, 2009, 12:22 pmwws says:
uh clem, yesterday you said “Let me know when somebody changes their mind over this.”
The Australian Senate just defeated Kevin Rudd’s ETS Bill, an effort which was all set to pass before this scandal broke. Now Rudd has to decide whether he wants to call new elections which will be a referendum on a new, wideranging tax scheme. I think that counts.
And we’re still just in the first inning of this game.
zuch, if you’d read the e-mails in question you’d realize just how badly the peer review process was corrupted by Phil Jones and others. What they did was an order of magnitude worse than anything that occurred in the Sternberg controversy, especially when they maneuvered to get any editors fired if they sinned and allowed critical articles to be printed. (and we thought that was the job of scientific journals)
counterstrike wrote: “The fact is, at least so far, there’s nothing in the emails except scientists wrangling as scientists do.”
Nonsense, counterstrike, unless you think that conspiring to evaade FOI requests is everyday activity in the scientific community. (where have you been working????) If you would read McArdle’s referenced article, you would not have made that comment because she did a good job of completely refuting your comment before you wrote it. (she had made the same comment earlier and now has realized why she was wrong to have written it)
December 2, 2009, 12:24 pmDiversityHire says:
wws, if zuch paused to read any of the linked documents how would he have time to fill each of these ClimateGate threads?
December 2, 2009, 12:28 pmwws says:
zuch, is every comment you make simply an attempt at misdirection? Is the APS now discredited simply because you don’t like Glenn Reynolds? Maybe you could enlighten us on exactly what it was in that guide to scientific inquiry you object to rather than simply making sophomoric comments as to style.
You could at least try checking out the link before you ridicule it.
December 2, 2009, 12:30 pmMGA says:
The loss of confidence in the manipulated data is not a tragedy. It is an opportunity. If we are being asked to spend trillions of dollars and turn the energy markets upside down, we had better be reasonably certain that the costs of doing nothing are worse. These people are not practicing science. They are worshipping at the church of global warming.
December 2, 2009, 12:30 pmMike says:
Dude, hope you’re trolling. They talked about deleting e-mails. You don’t delete e-mails if you’re honest. Or you think Arthur Anderson just started shredding documents because it was “that time of the month”? LOL.
Honest people with nothing to hide give everything to their lawyers. And, yes, any university complying with a FOI request is going to have some lawyers review the documents. Honest people let the lawyers decide what is relevant.
Dishonest people shred documents and delete e-mails. Basic stuff. [Hope I didn't spend 30 seconds replying to a troll.]
December 2, 2009, 12:31 pmHarryEagar says:
I expect Jones will not come back as director of CRU but on grounds of poor adminstrative ability rather than academic misconduct.
His academic conduct was outrageous, but how often do English universities discipline professors on those grounds?
December 2, 2009, 12:32 pmMike says:
Right. It’s not as if the global warming crowd is merely asking me to switch to energy efficient households. They are demanding that we slow the economy down and spend trillions. The burden of proof therefore rests on their shoulders.
One does not meet his burden of proof by using a “trick” to “hide the decline,” freezing scholars out of the peer review process, refusing to turn the over underlying, deleting the underlying data, and deleting e-mails when ordered to turn them over under Freedom of Information Act laws.
Sheesh. Re-reading the above makes me wonder: Are we talking about Enron and Arthur Anderson or scientists?
December 2, 2009, 12:37 pmwws says:
Just to be clear, let’s reproduce the Scientific Principles from the link that Zuch and Counterstrike object to. Maybe they can show specifically just what it is they find so offensive here:
http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/99_6.cfm
Ethics & Values / Education
99.6 “WHAT IS SCIENCE?”Email | Print
(Adopted by Council on November 14, 1999)
Science extends and enriches our lives, expands our imagination and liberates us from the bonds of ignorance and superstition. The American Physical Society affirms the precepts of modern science that are responsible for its success.
Science is the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the universe and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories.
The success and credibility of science are anchored in the willingness of scientists to:
1.Expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others. This requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials.
2.Abandon or modify previously accepted conclusions when confronted with more complete or reliable experimental or observational evidence.
December 2, 2009, 12:37 pmAdherence to these principles provides a mechanism for self-correction that is the foundation of the credibility of science.
OperationCounterstrike says:
WWS, there is no evidence of any attempt to evade FOI requirements in the emails so far, only an attempt to minimally-comply with them.
The fact is, those laws are being systematically abused by paid corporate info-requesters, who are trying to waste the scientists’ time. Well, just look at the nuisance requests being levelled against Richard Lensky (the lab-evolved citrate-eating bacteria guy) by for-profit fakes like Andy Schlafly.
Can you understand that a busy professional might resent being expected to waste time sending data to a clown like you???
December 2, 2009, 12:37 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Mike, you mean, someone MADE A JOKE about deleting data. As far as emails go, I don’t know what you do for a living, but there’s always reason to want to keep internal communications from going public.
WWS, do you think real medical scientists in the 1960s should have been required to share forums with tobacco-cancer denialists paid by the tobacco industry? But then the scientists would have had no time to do anything else–too many fakes demanding attention and data.
Should real AIDS researchers be expected to share a stage with Peter Duesberg and other HIV-denialist quacks?
This “everyone enters the fray and the truth will out” thing is science fiction. In fact you have to take careful measures to avoid letting no-nothing, attention-seeking kooks and shills into the fray, or else you will have no time for real, adversarial-among-experts science. That’s why we require, you know, advanced degrees!
December 2, 2009, 12:43 pmRobbo says:
“But the real tragedy of the Climategate scandal is that a lack of confidence in climate data will seriously impair mankind’s ability to assess and react properly to a potentially huge problem.”
Err, no.
There is no tragedy in Climategate.
The huge benefit is that Climate Science will be cleaned up, and any decisions necessary in future will be taken on the basis of verified, publicly available datasets, validated models, independent peer review, and open and honest debate. The tragedy is the state of Climate Science, and the degree of public deference to it, before the revelations.
December 2, 2009, 12:46 pmh2u says:
Don’t feed OperationCounterstrike. Troll drool is hard to clean up. Notice how no mention is made of the code — only the emails — which, in my humble opinion, is most devastating to the integrity of climate scientists. The emails simply provide a disturbing backdrop to the garbage code-driven shenanigans.
December 2, 2009, 1:01 pmfalafalafocus says:
I, for one, am glad that we have people like OperationCounterstrike who will tell us which scientists may be heard and which scientists (or quacks, as OC prefers) should be systematically silenced. I was under the obviously flawed perception that scientists should get published if their science held up against peer review. I now understand that peer review is too scary when the consensus is at jeopardy!
After all, such a system would never be abused, right?
December 2, 2009, 1:06 pmkdackson says:
I seem to recall one e-mail from Jones asking Mike Mann to delete any e-mails referencing the 4th IPCC report.
IANAL, but that sure sound like a little more than simply “evading” to me.
December 2, 2009, 1:08 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
FalafalaFocus:
Should real cancer-scientists in the 1960s have been required to share a platform with tobacco-cancer denialists funded by big tobacco? If not, why not?
Should scientsts in the field of abiogenesis and self-replicating systems be required to share a platform with “young-earth” kooks and Creationists? If not, why not?
Should AIDS-docs be required to share a platform with Peter Duesberg and the other, obviously-bad-faith HIV denialists? If not, why not?
You can’t get the benefits of a competitive, adversarial system, unless you restrict competition to serious competitors. Athenian democracy didn’t let EVERYONE vote, only those who knew enough about politics to understand what a vote MEANS.
Anyway, my offer stands: I’ll bet ten grand that nothing will come of this. Public attention will move on and the issue will sizzle.
If there were anything real in this, the right would not be making the bullshit arguments they have been making so far, based on easily-checkable exaggerations and context-switching. See for instance,
http://operationcounterstrike.blogspot.com/2009/11/three-things-you-dont-really-need-to.html
Anyway, my betting offer stands. Ten thousand bucks, any time. Watch and learn.
December 2, 2009, 1:21 pmsureyoubet says:
I’m finding it hard to understand why the reaction of the AGW alarmist crowd to this news wouldn’t be a cautious sense of relief that perhaps the grave harms predicted might not be so certain and that there might really be a chance that we don’t need to destroy economies and impoverish billions in order to avoid catastrophe. Of course we all need to look into the issues more deeply. But wouldn’t it be terrific if it turns out the models weren’t so right after all? That seems the best of all possible outcomes and one that is suddenly plausible in light of this news.
But no one seems to be having that reaction. Why?
December 2, 2009, 1:23 pmkdackson says:
Because their plan to rule the world will just be put on hold. Seriously.
They are not in it for the science, but for the continued funding and attention. I have a scientific background, and scientists are basically nerds and geeks. No one typically pays attention to us.
Except when the world is coming to an end!!!! And now that it might not be, they will again fade into obscurity.
December 2, 2009, 1:32 pmtamerlane says:
I just looked at a graph of the satelite data here. I’m not going to bother doing an ARIMA analysis on the data here but it sure looks to me like any “trend” in the data is actually “noisier” and less obvious than apparent trends in stock market data which are revealed to be spurious by more rigorous analyses. My conclusion is that the “gold standard” data show no trend in temperature over the last thirty years.
I don’t read the climatology journals. Can anyone point me to an article where the satelite data are subjected to rigorous time-series anayses, e.g., ARIMA methods? If not, is someone with the time and software willing to post such an analysis on the data to which I’ve linked?
December 2, 2009, 1:40 pmHarryEagar says:
sureyoubet asks: ‘But no one seems to be having that reaction. Why?’
Because what got publicized was fatal to the notion of warming. Michael ‘Hockeystick’ Mann called it a ‘smear campaign.’
Out of the mouths of babes. If he thinks it ‘smears’ the alarmists, I’ll take his word for it.
December 2, 2009, 2:02 pmfsfsfsfsfsfsfs says:
I suppose I am being repetitive, but this is extremely unlikely. Climategate will blow over in a few weeks, and there will be no lasting changes or improvements made as a result of it, precisely because people fail to understand the problems Climategate exposed.
Climategate did not “expose” a need for verifed, publicly available datasets, and the like. Anyone or any scientist closely following the literature already knew of these problems, and the problems of lack of reproducibility of the software. You could make all the data public, as Volokh advocates, and it would make very little difference to the public debate: people complaining that the raw data falsified some calculation or other would just be marginalized or ignored, just as they were prior to Climategate.
It’s only by modifying the incentives of scientists to produce correct, verifiable scientific reports; and by modifying the incentives of grant agencies to fund good scientists, that anything will change.
Currently, the situation in science does not incentivize correct science. It incentivizes science that generates data in accord with some grant agencies program direction. Scientists are promoted and hired based on proxies for ability that are trivial to game, like number of publications, status of journals where the work appeared, and funding success.
At the risk of being repetitious, the consequences of this incentive structure is eminently clear from the CRU code (or frankly from the Hansen code). The code and the database management is about as far from what a professional software engineer or computer scientist would design as is possible to imagine. And that’s precisely because there’s no incentive for the code to be correct, for the data to be traceable or accurate, for any of the work to be reproducible. As has been relentlessly documented, journals do minimal statistical verification of statistical analyses submitted to them, there is no code review, there is a strong bias against publishing negative results generally.
Thus, currently a scientist who can get 20 other colleagues to approve each others work can easily amass a tremendous number of publications, none statistically validated or subject to appropriate data and code validation, amass a lot of funding and get tenure. More important, careful scientists who don’t do this will not get funded and eventually will have less and less influence on the scientific process. After a while, all the journals, tenure committees, and grant agencies become completely subsumed by people checking proxies for quality of scientific work, rather than the work itself – importance, originality, reproducibility, and correctness.
Obviously, this is hardly an easy problem to solve, and I won’t endeavor to do so here. But it’s utterly unrealistic to believe that climategate will make a significant difference – because climategate doesn’t change anyone’s incentives so it won’t change anyone’s behavior. Climate scientists are still incentivized to exaggerate their data. Governments are still incentivized to fund those who do so the most. Non-climate scientists in institutions are still incentivized not to complain about the work of their colleagues. Non-specialists in the field don’t have the time or expertise to delve into the details of the work, and are necessarily swayed by summaries.
I’m being repetitious, but it gets old, to watch libertarians quoxitically rant and rave about fallacies in the studies that purport to support the latest goverment bureaucracy, always thinking with just the right arguments they’ll make a difference. They did it with the drug war – did that convince anyone? They do it with gun control. They did it with TARP. They do it with the UIGEA. They do it with asset forfeiture. With SWAT raids. They are doing it with climate science, tilting at wind farms if you will.
I’ve seen this pattern for decades now, and it’s tiring. Some eager libertarian finds some flaw or other in the logic that was used justify some bureaucracy. Excitedly, he trumpets the flaw, declaims on all the abuses of the bureaucracy – and you know what? Nothing happens. Maybe the rhetoric is altered a bit, some slight moderation on the edges of the latest crisis, the legal rationalizations change a bit, but the bureaucracies grow unimpeded.
And it’s because the underlying rationale is irrelevant to the incentive structure of the actors. Here, all the major actors are incentivized to fund projects related to the latest perceived threat, in this case global warming. So programs to do so will burgeon, probably for the foreseeable future.
December 2, 2009, 2:03 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
If the data and code are made available on line, it takes ZERO or nearly zero time to respond.
BTW, I work at a company with technical products. We put very bit of technical data we can on line so we don’t have to waste time responding to requests.
It says something about East Anglia’s poor administrative skills that their system, like their implementation of climatic fudge factors, appears to require a great deal of manual human intervention. OTOH if your goal is to restrict dissemination, then that may be a feature rather than a bug.
December 2, 2009, 2:07 pmDavid McCourt says:
“Anyway, my offer stands: I’ll bet ten grand that nothing will come of this.”
Too late, something already has come of it. The Australian Senate defeated carbon trading legislation, and the CRU scandal formed an important, perhaps decisive backdrop, according to Australian journalists.
You may remit your check to any one of the conspirators running this web site, who will pass it on. Oh, and I don’t accept personal checks from Prof. Phil Jones or any of his colleagues at the University of East Anglia. In their case, cash only.
December 2, 2009, 2:08 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
Sigh. All too true. The one difference is that perhaps this time the stakes are large enough and the funny business caught early enough to put paid to this mess.
December 2, 2009, 2:15 pmFub says:
I am not aware of any incident in which Prof. Duesberg has been denied FOIA access to primary or raw HIV/AIDS data or analysis methodology, by any “real AIDS researcher”.
However, if that has actually happened, a citation to a report of the event would support your argument.
Even Medical Hypotheses, which peer review is negligible, found one of his papers too egregious to publish (synopsis of event here). That can hardly be attributed to “real AIDS researchers” stacking the peer review process or editorial board.
December 2, 2009, 2:19 pmRoger Zimmerman says:
As as an example of the power of the scientific method, I believe it is worth recalling the story of “Cold Fusion”.
The 20th anniversary of the Pons-Fleischmann experiments passed this May. At the time, the results were greeted with a mixture of hope and skepticism, and quite a bit of small-p (and some large-P) political controversy. The scientists were primarily criticized for the way they publicized their results directly to the popular press, though this was going on in parallel with a normal peer-review process.
This criticism was completely appropriate and healthy, in my view. After all, their finding, if true, would have enormous socio-economic impact. Government funding was almost certainly involved in their experiments, and would come flowing fast if the field had real promise. So, jumping the peer-review gun was not in best interests of science.
But, what Pons and Fleischmann did NOT do was hide their data and methodology from their peers. Indeed, the first attempts to replicate their experiments were underway within weeks, if not days. There were occasional hints of success, along with many failures, and P-F were in close communication with those scientists trying to replicate. Ultimately the consensus was formed that the results must have derived from experimental error (including the finding that P-F didn’t actually measure the nuclear reaction products they thought they were getting). This process was pretty much completed by the end of 1989 – the main stream had seriously considered the P-F claims, had tested them thoroughly, and had concluded they were not valid.
Now, the general field of “Cold Fusion” is not dead, but the adherents/proponents are arguably scientific zealots/pariahs proceeding outside the main stream, and probably without any substantial public money. It will certainly take extraordinary proof and crystal clear presentation of the evidence to overcome this status. But, I think it is a possibility, assuming that these methodological principles are followed.
This story vividly demonstrates that the scientific method of radical skepticism works: any claimed experimental finding should be subject to the highest level of scrutiny, and this must be facilitated by complete transparency on the part of the claimant. Pons and Fleischmann were undoubtedly embarrassed by the workings of this process, but, ultimately, they did cooperate with it and thereby avoided damaging the larger scientific enterprise in which they were involved (or at least made sure that Cold Fusion was relegated to the very speculative realm). That the warmists have evaded this process from the beginning is clear, and it will be their shame.
December 2, 2009, 2:23 pmuh_clem says:
sureyoubet asks: ‘But no one seems to be having that reaction. Why?’
Because even if every accusation against Phil Jones were true, the overall scientific picture doesn’t change much. The glaciers are still melting and no amount of discussion is going to unmelt them.
December 2, 2009, 2:23 pmkdackson says:
The galciers have been melting, on average for 12,000 years.
December 2, 2009, 2:28 pmRichard Aubrey says:
clem.
December 2, 2009, 2:30 pmSeems hard to imagine all glaciers melting when CRU is at pains to hide/explain recent cooling.
From what I’ve hears, some melt, some grow.
You’ll have taken the Himalayan glaciers out of your complaint, right?
Widmerpool says:
Hey, OperationCounterstrike, you sure like throwing around terms like “no-nothing,” [sic] so please, you spelling-challenged, know-nothing twit troll, put me down for your $10,000 bet. Idjit.
December 2, 2009, 2:42 pmgeokstr says:
Wow. What a risk-taking gambler you are.
On your side, every government on the planet, nearly every so-called objective media, celebrities galore, most of academia. So the refs and the promoters have already all been bought.
And in this corner, the few brave enough to stand up to this massed destruction machine, and if they so much as drive past an Exxon station on their way home, can look forward to their garbage cans being sniffed by the heavily experienced, highly paid teams of lawyers and reporters who honed their skills in Wasilla.
Hell, I’m not even on your side, and I’d make that same bet too if honor and integrity didn’t mean a rat’s derriere to me either.
December 2, 2009, 2:56 pmwws says:
The funny thing about the “glaciers melting” claim is that it comes from a line in the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserts that the Himalayan glaciers would disapear by 2035 if warming continued at the current rate.
But where did this date come from? Apparently from page 66 of a 1996 Russian paper which theorized that the glaciers would melt by 2350 at current rates. (as if climate could be predicted 350 years out) Whoever issued the IPCC report was either using a copy with a typo or else transposed the original date so that 2350 came out as 2035.
So the claim that the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly melting rests on a typographical error! Not to mention that the recent measured melting of the Himalayan glaciers (real measured data, not computer modeled “data”) is actually very close to 0.
Once again, the case for AGW rests on the back of “data” that doesn’t actually exist.
http://tinyurl.com/yjzvlgz
December 2, 2009, 3:04 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Wws, would you call the satallite images which indicate massive melting of the polar ice caps (no one disputes this) “‘data’ that don’t actually exist”?
December 2, 2009, 3:06 pmsteve says:
AAA-”If the data and code are made available on line, it takes ZERO or nearly zero time to respond. ”
The data in question was supposedly on paper. The time and cost of replicating would be……….I really dont know, but probably not small. As Prof Volokh noted yesterday, some of the data collectors were not allowing release by CRU.
Roger Zimmerman-Exactly! The BEST method is to replicate the studies. Part of the scientific process is looking for problems, however, reproducibility is key. Suppose you used the exact same data but no one could get the same results? Hypothesis disproved.
For that matter, why insist on using the same data? Stop thinking like lawyers, as if, and think like a scientist. Prove your own case. Take the data you consider relevant, heaven knows the CRU could have tilted their data selection, make your own models. Defend it and let the scientific community decide which science is the best.
I also think we should have a pretty far ranging investigation. My first choice, since this is important , is total transparency, including emails, from everyone, including the skeptics. What is sauce for the goose……….
BTW, does anyone actually read McIntyre? He can be a sarcastic SOB.
Steve
December 2, 2009, 3:06 pmCurious passerby says:
OperationCounterstrike and zuch seem to have full time jobs trying to rescue AGW. But still, this is like watching the Berlin Wall come down and sends a thrill up my leg.
December 2, 2009, 3:07 pmh2u says:
After reading the hacked emails it becomes quite clear that the AGW-promoting climate scientists tried very, very hard to prevent the scientific community from being exposed to alternative viewpoints. Do you need citations in order to believe this claim? I’d be happy to pull them up.
I read McIntyre’s blog quite regularly. If I walked a mile in his shoes I imagine I’d be a sarcastic SOB as well. His admirable goal of auditing the work of “reputable” climate scientists has certainly not been made easy by the “hockey team.”
December 2, 2009, 3:19 pmHarryEagar says:
I dispute massive melting of the South Polar ice cap.
December 2, 2009, 3:21 pmgeokstr says:
More proof that clem and zuch and blue N and the others defending the CRU don’t read the links provided by anybody, because they’ve got their agreed upon talking points down.
All this alarmism in the IPCC report about the glaciers melting by 2035 is based on a transposition error in the date – the original report said 2350, not 2035. And if you read the link, you’d know that this is all based on a highly speculative report that fails to take into consideration a lot of other important data, and says that only 20% of the glaciers are supposedly going to melt by then, and that the Himalayas are NOT in danger of melting, etc, et al, ad nauseum.
And that’s if you believe they have any basis whatsoever for knowing what will happen to glaciers 325 years from now, if they admit that it’s terrible that they can’t account for a little cooling blip happening NOW. They have had to carefully choose their periods so they don’t have to account for the Medieval Warming Period when temps were much higher than projected by the IPCC, if we do nothing, when wheat farmers, ranchers and vintners lived in Greenland.
Hey, zuch, care to give us some more of your raucous humor about not aspiring to be medieval again?
December 2, 2009, 3:22 pmkdackson says:
wws:
Not to mention that at those altitudes, the temperatures are still substantially below 0 C, so the loss of glacier ice mass is not due to increased temperature, but due to sublimation of the ice into the air.
Sort of how the ice cubes seem to disappear in your freezer.
December 2, 2009, 3:23 pmRichard Aubrey says:
kdackson.
December 2, 2009, 3:26 pmNo, that was my kids. Never filled the trays.
Got an icemaker now.
Ice keeps appearing in my refrigerator. Maybe I should write a dissertation?
kdackson says:
Check the half-moons when you get back from a long weekend. Some will look really disfigured.
And probably taste funny. And not the Ha-Ha kind of funny.
December 2, 2009, 3:29 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Well, my position is that the science IS settled and we have always been at war with East Asia.
December 2, 2009, 3:35 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Geokstr, you wrote: “On your side, every government on the planet, nearly every so-called objective media, celebrities galore, most of academia. So the refs and the promoters have already all been bought.”
And WHY do you think it is that “most of academia” is on my side?
It’s the same reason “most of academia” is on my side in dismissing the abortion-breast-cancer bugaboo–because my side has the convincing evidence, and the other side has, mostly, obvious bad-faith arguments.
You can’t get most of academia to go along with bad science. Not enough money to bribe EVERYONE! Not everyone has integrity, but enough do to prevent those who don’t from conning the community.
Focus on the facts. The emails have been available for several days now, and the right-wing is STILL relying on exaggeration, context-switching, and vague blather about “subverting peer-review” and “freedom of information” and “bias”.
Once again, excluding hired nuisance-kooks is NOT subverting peer review, and exchanging ideas on how to cope with FOI-abusers is NOT violating FOI laws, and trying to include info going back two millenia rather than one is NOT bias.
If there’s anything substantial in the emails, why haven’t we seen it? Why has no one focussed on a list of specific, provable violations?
(“The indictment had never been clearly expressed,
And it seemed that the judge had begun,
And had spoken for hours, before anyone guessed
What the [defendant] was supposed to have done!”)
Roger Zimmerman’s comment above is a nice case in point. He discusses cold fusion and then pops onto the end of his post, the following disconnected whopper: “That the warmists have evaded this process [disclosure, answering challenges from skeptics] from the beginning is clear,…”
No it is not clear, and most likely not true. See, this is what annoys me so much. Someone like Zimmerman reads discussions in the emails about what data must be shared and what data don’t need to be shared, and he jumps to a broad accusation of evasion, which is not supported by the emails! He reads a discussion about minimally-complying with FOI laws in the face of rampant nuisance-abuse, and he sees an attempt to break those laws. This is the same debate style that brought us the “Whitewater scandal” (did anyone ever figger out what that was about???) and, more recently, “death-panel” hysteria.
Those of you who call me a “troll”, well, if I’m a troll, then it should be easy for you to convince Eugene Volokh to ban me and delete my comments. Try it!
December 2, 2009, 3:39 pmkdackson says:
This is not science. This is politics masquerading as “science”.
And the sooner you learn that, the sooner you will be at peace.
December 2, 2009, 3:43 pmDotar Sojat says:
AGW is an ideologically necessary tool for a larger agenda. It will not be given up as long as the agenda remains unfulfilled. The question of whether it is a significant factor in a warming trend that may or may not be happening is beside the point. The queston of whether a little warming may be a good or bad thing is beside the point. It has to be bad, because that furthers the agenda. Are we now at the optimum global climate? Says whom? Is it now as warm as the temperate period prior to the Little Ice Age? If not, how did personkind and all the flora and fauna survive that period? The Churchgoers really don’t seem to care.
December 2, 2009, 3:43 pmkdackson says:
Oh yes, and just remember: All guns are hired. Wheteher that is good or bad depends upon which side you are on.
December 2, 2009, 3:49 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » ClimateGate Updates -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by RC Richards, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: ClimateGate Updates: Last night, the University of East Anglia announced that Phil Jones, a central figure in t.. http://bit.ly/7hBwah [...]
December 2, 2009, 3:49 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
h2u, you wrote: “After reading the hacked emails it becomes quite clear that the AGW-promoting climate scientists tried very, very hard to prevent the scientific community from being exposed to alternative viewpoints. Do you need citations in order to believe this claim? ”
Yes, please, I do. And, I need citations which refer, as you say, to a clear effort to “prevent the scientific community from being exposed to alternative viewpoints”, NOT to an effort to exclude non-members of that community from serious forums.
Suppose I WANTED to “prevent the scientific community from being exposed to alternative viewpoints”. How would I go about doing that??? Keeping the alternative viewpoints out of the top journals wouldn’t work; the scientific community could read the alternatives viewpoints on lower-level journals, and then raise a stink about exclusion.
PersonfromPorlock’s most recent comment above is another nice case in point. Instead of an argument, he gives us a humorous reference to NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. This is typical of the response to these emails we’re seeing from the right. No substance; all “gotcha”-tricks. Not enough, folks.
Maybe something substantial will emerge, but it hasn’t yet, and every passing hour makes it less and less likely that anything so-far missed will come to light.
December 2, 2009, 3:50 pmDavid McCourt says:
“…massive melting of the polar ice caps (no one disputes this).”
See ice is increasing in the Antarctic. In 2007 it was over 16 million sq. km., more than at any time since the inception of satellite measurements in 1979. See:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
Perhaps that is why the IPCC 4th Assessment reported: “Current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall.”
Of course, these models are iffy, and satellite data for 30 years is but a snapshot, but that has never stopped the AGW alarmists from preaching certainty based on crude models and inadequate data.
December 2, 2009, 3:56 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Kdackson, what you say (“all guns are hired”) is a very popular thing to say these days, but it is not true. There IS such a thing as committment to follow the data with a good-faith attempt at objectivity. Unlikely, unpopular ideas DO get accepted in the face of supporting data–just look at the Prion-hypothesis. Or, for that matter, go read the initial reactions in the scientific community to the first reports of Reverse Transcriptase.
If Pons had hidden his cold-fusion data, he would have been debunked just as thoroughly. Covering up, attempting to block the scientific community from seeing alternative arguments, JUST DOESN’T WORK, and everyone knows it.
December 2, 2009, 4:06 pmCurious passerby says:
I don’t trust my government at all, but maybe China and India will be too smart to harm their people over this fraud. And if they expand the carbon footprint of each of their 2 billion people then anything we do will be pointless.
December 2, 2009, 4:10 pmcirby says:
Well, except for Climate Scientology…
December 2, 2009, 4:12 pmkdackson says:
OC, to coin a phrase: “Bullshit”. Everyone has an agenda, and those “who are not with us are against us”. Sound familiar?
I have been doing mathematical modeling for close to 30 years, and I have seen the methods clowns like these people have employed.
There is no “good faith” on the part of AGW proponents, as their continued livlihood is dependent upon securing more research grants. The easiest way to do that is to play the “imminent disaster” card. And that’s what these schysters have been doing all along.
They resist giving data to people who do not agree with them, that they declare “not worthy”. By virtue of controlling the review process in journals where only “serious” researchers are allowed to publish. Nice system there: fix the editorial board, and have your cronies do all the “reviews” of your papers and exclude contrary or questioning data. Then declare the people who are not with the “in” crowd unserious.
That is pure unmitigated BULLSHIT.
Pons actually sought confirmation because if it had proven to be true, he would have been a star. So he actively assisted other groups trying to confirm his work.
Not so with this bunch.
December 2, 2009, 4:19 pmJohn Moore says:
OCS = Major thread fail
#1 ‘I will bet ten thousand dollars, with anyone who wishes: nothing will come of this.’
Pay up or shut up, dude. Ask the Aussies about what has already become of this
#2 ‘polar ice caps (no one disputes this)’
Epic fail again.
OCS – you are way out of your league in this thread. There are better scandal deniers than you on here. Maybe you should leave your work to them.
December 2, 2009, 4:19 pmkdackson says:
Now that concept I like. Mind if I use it?
December 2, 2009, 4:21 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Cirby, thanks for another case-in-point. Instead of making an argument with evidence, you make a joke, which is based on the ASSUMPTION of your position, not an argument for it. “Climate Scientology”–whom are you hoping to convince, of what, by saying that?
And this sort of thing–jokes, schoolyard insults, assumptions that the right-wing position just has to be correct, soundbites rather than arguments, comments better suited for fundraising rallys than for serious discourse–is ALL we’re seeing from the right.
December 2, 2009, 4:23 pmgeokstr says:
For the same reason that the media and the celebrities are on your side – they’re nearly all committed leftists who believe that their philosophy of collectivism should be ruling the planet right now, not those evil greedy racist capitalist-roaders.
Note that “academia” includes probably a pretty small minority of people with hard science degrees of any kind, given all the other subjects taught at a university. And as we’ve debated endlessly here, with all the leftists either denying the leftwing hegemony of academia or just saying, well, it’s because only liberals are intelligent and all rightwingers are too stupid to cut it in academia.
Governments, on the other hand, all have the incentives to increase both their power and revenues, so they’re on board, left or right.
I’ve never called you a troll, and even if you were, you have been relatively civil. Why do you think anyone here would try to ban you? There are some people here who always are abusive and uncivil, and they’re not banned. I’ll even admit to getting overheated by the leftists here on occasion, and even had one of them call me a troll, even though I’ve been commenting here on a lot of issues for well over a year.
December 2, 2009, 4:24 pmRoger Zimmerman says:
What is clear from the totality of AGW history (not just the emails) is that the warmists have not cooperated with skeptics in giving them direct access to 100% of the models, 100% crystal clear descriptions of the methodology, nor 100% of raw, completely annotated data.
I work in Automatic Speech Recognition, and therefore with mega-parameter models and gigabytes of training/test data every day, and without all of the above, it is impossible to replicate results. We spend roughly 30% of our development time configuring experimental setups which provide for this repeatability, and we could hand these off to anyone that asked with a few hours of work per experiment (not per request). We do this all the time within our company, and if the algorithms were not proprietary, we would be able to do this with outsiders as well. Of course, in the commercial realm, our algorithms our self-validating – either they work to accurately recognize speech, or they don’t. So, we put all of this scientific rigor in place simply to save development resources.
Armed with this kind of setup, motivated skeptics would be able to replicate (or not), and then start playing around with the assumptions in the models and in the data adjustment methods. The truth would soon out. This is, in effect, what Pons/Fleischmann did. They may have been “forced” to do this, but the primary forcing (to borrow a term) was from the scientific ethos in their field.
The irony is that, since Climate science is so computer-modeling-centric, given the aforementioned prerequisites, a skeptic could very easily “redo” the “experiments”, and then easily modify these experiments to test the assumptions, etc. This is actually in contrast to the Cold Fusion case where P&F probably were on the phone all day for months working with people to try to get them to do the experiments “right”. Perhaps it is this relative ease of experimentation which motivated the AGW priesthood to be so possessive of the tools of their trade.
December 2, 2009, 4:28 pmrarango says:
As Curious Passerby notes, irrespective of the current CRU kerfluffle, it’s all a tempest in a teapot. The reality is that the Indians and Chinese arent going to sign on to any carbon reduction program irrespective of whatever comes out of the Copenhagen conference–and it looks like the Aussies rejected cap and trade as well (And OC: something has already come of it.)
December 2, 2009, 4:28 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
JOhn Moore: I guess I should clarify: when I say “nothing will come of this” I’m not talking about a political vote; I’m talking about revelations of serious fraud, and dismissal of some scientists, or at least, disciplinary action against someone.
YOu wrote: “OCS — you are way out of your league in this thread. There are better scandal deniers than you on here. Maybe you should leave your work to them.”
Excuse me, I think I am better qualified to discuss these issues than most people on this thread. How many of you have actually DONE any physical chemistry???
Kdackson, you wrote: “There is no “good faith” on the part of AGW proponents, as their continued livlihood is dependent upon securing more research grants.”
I believe most of the authors of the stolen emails have tenure. Their continued livlihood is dependent on NOTHING. Don’t even need to show up for work!
You wrote: “The easiest way to do that is to play the “imminent disaster” card. And that’s what these schysters have been doing all along.”
That’s one hypothesis, but there are others.
You wrote: “They resist giving data to people who do not agree with them, that they declare “not worthy”. By virtue of controlling the review process in journals where only “serious” researchers are allowed to publish. Nice system there: fix the editorial board, and have your cronies do all the “reviews” of your papers and exclude contrary or questioning data. Then declare the people who are not with the “in” crowd unserious.”
You are ignoring the fact that there are people who really ARE unserious. Some people REALLY DO need to be excluded. You are looking at the emails and ASSUMING that some bad-faith variation is what is going on–that the exclusion process is being abused. But you have no BASIS for that.
You are like someone who says “Dartmouth excludes liberal applicants–see, they even ADMIT that they have an admissions committee, and that they accept some applicants and reject others!” Not good enough.
December 2, 2009, 4:36 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
You wanna talk about who’s qualified to discuss this? OK, here’s an example of what I would consider a minimal qualification: you should AT LEAST be able to explain to me how laser-cooling works–you know, the process which netted Energy Secretary Steve Chu his Nobel Prize. What does the Doppler Effect have to do with it? What was the technological advancement that made it possible? How do you explain the apparent paradox that irradiation PUMPS HEAT INTO what is irradiated, so should not be a cooling method? If you can’t answer this, then you don’t know enough about how light interacts with gas-phase matter for your opinion to be worth a single solitary damn.
December 2, 2009, 4:53 pmsteve says:
“After reading the hacked emails it becomes quite clear that the AGW-promoting climate scientists tried very, very hard to prevent the scientific community from being exposed to alternative viewpoints. Do you need citations in order to believe this claim? I’d be happy to pull them up.”
Nope, I saw some of them. I think that should be investigated to see if it is true. We are eavesdropping on private conversations. If true, the guilty need some appropriate punishment and said papers should be published.
What I am pushing for, and is being resisted, not sure why, is to have skeptics do their own study, just as was done with cold fusion. Instead of endless discussion about whether a given statistical method is valid, do research. Come up with a better model. Skeptics think they understand this better, so prove it. It is inconceivable that such a study would not be published now.
Just because I am puzzled, why would you not want such a study to be done?
Steve
December 2, 2009, 4:54 pmwws says:
Counterstrike, I’ll bet you’ve been comparing pictures in June with pictures from January and have been amazed that they are different. (that’s a common trick among those promoting the “Ice caps are melting!!! scare.)
First, there’s currently 10% *more* sea ice in the antarctic ice cap than there was in 1980. There’s an inconvenient fact for you.
And if you want a very good raw data depiction of just how variable the arctic sea ice truly is, here’s a time lapse video of arctic sea ice extent from 1979 – 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j8SGs_gnFk&feature=player_embedded
Summer 2007 was a low point, but the icecap has been growing (based on sameday comparison)ever since then. Guess what, right now the arctic icecap is almost back to where it was on this day in 2002. So how did 7 years of warming vanish so quickly? How can you say that “the icecaps are shrinking” when for 2 years going on 3 they’ve actually been growing???
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
and here’s something I’ll bet you missed: The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/10/06/antarctic-ice-melt-at-lowest-levels-in-satellite-era/
of course, the terror of the melting icecaps is nothing new:
From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:
• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”
• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”
• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”
• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”
• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”
• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”
• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”
• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”
• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”
• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”
• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”
• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”
• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”
• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”
• 2004: “There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.”
• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting – a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.”
(difficult to imagine? LOL – it’s been constantly imagined since 1881)
December 2, 2009, 4:58 pmcirby says:
OCS:
December 2, 2009, 5:00 pmI’ll try to remember, for future use, that while you’re very happy with insulting “the other guys,” a mildly derisive comment about your pet climate hobbyists will be treated as something beyond the pale…
wws says:
And, for those who say that the climate scientists have no incentive to fake their results and certainly are far too ethical to ever do such a thing, there is an interesting story out just today:
Former NASA climate scientist pleads guilty to contract fraud
A former top climate scientist who had become of one the scientific world’s most cited authorities on the human effect on Earth’s atmosphere was sentenced to probation Tuesday after pleading guilty to steering lucrative no-bid contracts to his wife’s company.
In addition to a year’s probation, former NASA manager Mark Schoeberl, 60, of Silver Spring, was also fined $10,000 and ordered to put in 50 hours of community service. He admitted in the late summer that he had hid some $50,000 in NASA contracts for a company called Animated Earth, which was run by Schoeberl’s wife, Barbara. Prosecutors alleged that Schoeberl tried to help his wife’s firm for years. When his colleagues balked at giving no-bid contracts to his wife’s firm, Schoeberl pressured them to steer money to his wife through indirect means.
Schoeberl was the chief scientist of the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Earth Sciences Division and the head of the Aura Project, a NASA mission to study the Earth’s ozone layer, air quality and climate. He has written extensively about the depletion of the ozone level, and the influence of humans on global climate change.
http://tinyurl.com/yhr5jda
December 2, 2009, 5:01 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
WWS, there you go again. What does one person’s conviction, on charges unrelated to scientific integrity (only to hiring integrity), have to do with the question? You are using what I call “ARSE”–Anecdote Recital Strategy Exercise.
Schoeberl could have steered contracts to his wife just as easily if he were in some other field, or if he were a gw-denier.
You say he also wrote about the Ozone layer. Well then, are you saying that his conviction means there’s no hole in the ozone layer?
Turning out wrong about GW would not kill anyone’s career. They’d move on and study something else! Happens all the time, in science.
Again, I wouldn’t mind this sort of weak ad-hominum “gotcha”-style debating–IF THERE WERE ALSO OTHER ARGUMENTS GOING ON. But this sort of garbage is ALL we are seeing from the scandal-hungry readers of the stolen emails. No substance.
December 2, 2009, 5:13 pmJoJo Dog says:
Don’t forget that Heidi Cullen wanted to strip scientific certification of anyone who disagreed with Global Warming.
December 2, 2009, 5:14 pmHarryEagar says:
counterstrike sez: ‘excluding hired nuisance-kooks’
Are you saying McIntyre is on the payroll of somebody? Want to back that up?
Jeff Id? Want to back that up?
Bishop Hill? Want to back that up?
and steve sez: ‘ have skeptics do their own study’
That’s what McIntyre, McKitrick, Id etc. have done. Visit the Air Vent, for example. And McIntyre, as you ought to know, challenged the assertion by the alarmists that it was too much trouble to update the tree cores by hypothesizing that you could start at Starbucks, visit the trees, and return to Starbucks, all within the daylight one one day.
And he tested his hypothesis by doing it. It was on the Innertubes. All the kids are using it.
I am not surprised that steve, zuch etc. do not have full command of the materials. It took me a couple of months to catch up when I started following the matters closely. If all you do is read Real Climate, it shows.
December 2, 2009, 5:16 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Some guy claims he can predict exactly what cities it will rain in three weeks from any given date, but refuses to provide sufficient evidence to validate *his* claim. What do you do?
All you can do is point out flaws in the way he claims to make the predictions. Point out that his past predictions haven’t come true. Demand he give you more details on how he claims to produce these amazing results or substantiate their claimed accuracy.
You can demand he make public verifiable and testable predictions and reject his claims until those predictions come true. You can ask that he give you enough information to precisely repeat his experiment so you can get your own verifiable results.
But for what possible reason would you try to improve your own weather predictions as a response to him? That makes no sense. If you fail to match his claims, which you certainly will, what will that prove?
The AGW proponents claim to have solved numerous hard problems for which at least this particular skeptic believes we have no solutions. How is it a rational response to those claims for me to try to solve problems for which I believe no solutions are likely possible yet?
If someone claims to be psychic, can I refute his claims by proving *I* have no psychic powers?
December 2, 2009, 5:17 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Integrity is integrity.
Why would a person who is criminally dishonest in one realm – pressuring his colleagues to go along with his crime – be scrupulously honest in another?
I never want to read another word about greedy climate skeptics taking money from Big Oil.
December 2, 2009, 5:19 pmfalafalafocus says:
OperationCounterstrike:
Apparently, you missed my statement that “scientists should get published if their science held up against peer review.”
So, to answer your questions:
1. If the science in the 1960s in favor of “tobacco deniers” (whatever that means) withstood peer review, then yes, they should be entitled to share the spotlight.
2. If the science in the field of abiogenesis and self-replicating systems in favor of “young-earth” kooks (as you call them) and Creationists withstands peer review, then yes, they should be entitled to share the spotlight.
3. If the science in the field of AIDs research in favor of Peter Duesberg and “the other, obviously-bad-faith HIV denialists” withstands peer review, then yes, they should be entitled to share the spotlight.
What is so complicated about my position?
December 2, 2009, 5:27 pmh2u says:
LOL — so who gets to decide who is a member of these “serious forums?” You’re ridiculous. The scientific community involves anyone who is willing to contribute to research, reviewing or auditing. You can’t pick and choose who belongs based on some agenda-driven criteria.
December 2, 2009, 5:30 pmDavid Schwartz says:
steve: The crux of what you’re missing is that in the case of cold fusion, those who claimed to have detected it provided sufficient information so that their experiments could be replicated and worked with skeptics to try to allow the skeptics to reproduce their experiments. Imagine if instead they had said, “Sorry you guys can’t reproduce our experiments, you’re probably doing something wrong. We won’t tell you exactly how we did it. In fact, we’re not sure exactly how we had things set up.”
The reason science converged on the truth quickly in the case of cold fusion is that Pons and Fleischmann were honest scientists who made a mistake and were genuinely interested in proving their claims, not just in having them be believed. Had they (and those who claimed to replicate their results) dug in their heels, people still to this day might be saying “maybe Pons and Fleischmann were right, and maybe the early claimed replications were right”.
The same thing happened in AIDS research. Duesberg did get quite a bit of spotlight (and when he made coherent arguments, they were looked at), and many do still hold his views. But they do no significant scientific damage anymore (sadly, they still do damage of other kinds).
In any event, there’s nothing we can do about it. If we try to make science suppress kooks earlier, we will run into serious problems when the kooks are right. While any given kook is rarely right, losing the contribution of all kooks would slow the pace of science to a crawl.
December 2, 2009, 5:37 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
FalafalaFocus, your answer assumes that the peer-review process is good. I have written about this elsewhere: the journal’s editorial board selects which peers do the reviewing. According to the emails, that’s why Prof Mann wanted to get rid of Hans von Storch–he was selecting “peers” who would approve shoddy work, apparently in an effort to be more even-handed than the facts (“Shape of the World, flat or round? Experts differ”).
H2U, you’re right, legitimate members of the scientific community should not be excluded based on their positions. But there’s no evidence that this is what’s happening. Again, it’s not enough to say “look, Dartmouth has an admissions committee!” You must also prove that the committee is doing something wrong.
YOu wrote: “The scientific community involves anyone who is willing to contribute to research, reviewing or auditing. ”
LOL–So should the editors of the Journal of the American Chemical Society accept papers, reviewing, and auditing, from high-school french-teachers, if they are willing to contribute? IF not, why not? How about janitors? Policemen? You said ANYONE who is willing….
December 2, 2009, 5:46 pmDavid McCourt says:
OperationCounterstroke,You ignored your blatant misstatement regarding Antarctica when I pointed it out. OK, so you missed seeing it the first time. Then, you ignored it again when John Moore pointed it out to you, under his heading “Epic Fail #2.” Perhaps you were too … busy, drafting the many, many posts you have here, to deal with the error. Still….
Just so you don’t miss the chance to respond to it a third time, here it is. You say:
To which I said:
Oh, and as to your “clarifying,” i.e., narrowing, the terms of your famous, loudly-trumpeted bet after having lost it, well, I’ll let you off the hook, and we’ll just regard it as yet another “adjustment” in the spirit of CRU.
December 2, 2009, 5:51 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
OperationCounterstrike,
You are ignoring the fact that there are people who really ARE unserious. Some people REALLY DO need to be excluded. You are looking at the emails and ASSUMING that some bad-faith variation is what is going on–that the exclusion process is being abused. But you have no BASIS for that.
Not so. No one “needs to be excluded.” No one should be denied access to the raw material any scientist’s conclusions rest on solely because s/he doesn’t have the right credentials, the right friends, or the right attitude. No one should be protecting his/her data from scrutiny by anyone.
You can judge your own position vis-a-vis those you use as examples very easily. Do cancer researchers withhold their data from tobacco-company shills? Evolutionary biologists their data from creationists? AIDS researchers their data from people who don’t think HIV causes AIDS? People who don’t think vaccines cause autism their data from people who think they do? Serious astronomers their data from Velikovsky and the like? Honest people generally want people to see how right they are and how sound are their data and their procedures; people who would rather delete raw data than let their perceived enemies see them really do give the very strong impression that they’ve something to hide.
December 2, 2009, 6:01 pmh2u says:
Actually, there is. Read the damn emails.
Absolutely! If they have something to add to the discussion then there is no reason why they should be excluded. The problem is, as illustrated by the leaked correspondence, that the gatekeepers of climate science wanted nothing to do with people who were poking holes in their shoddy science.
See here, here and here.
December 2, 2009, 6:04 pmmariner says:
h2u:
Ah, but you can if you’re Jones or Mann; that is one of the problems now made public.
This sort of crap goes on in other fields as well. Remember how drug companies making billions and billions of dollars selling expensive antacids suppressed research indicating that most duodenal ulcers were caused by bacterial infection?
I suspect the same sort of nonsense is going on in the AIDS industry as well.
December 2, 2009, 6:06 pmkdackson says:
Einstein was a patent clerk, so I guess his stuff should have been rejected out of hand as well.
You are an elitist, intellectual bigot.
December 2, 2009, 6:13 pmh2u says:
Great point! Scientific insight often comes from unexpected places.
December 2, 2009, 6:19 pmJed Rothwell says:
The assertions made here about cold fusion are factually wrong, and widely at variance with the peer-reviewed literature on the subject. I urge readers here to study this literature carefully before making statements about this subject. Regarding policy, you should read official publications such as November 15, 2009 Defense Intelligence Agency evaluation; the 1989 NSF meeting; the 1990 BARC publication; the 2004 DoE Report, which recommended funding for the research; and the October 2009 conference sponsored by the ENEA (the Italian DoE), The Italian Physical Society and Chemical Society, and the Italian National Research Council.
You will find the Defense Intelligence Agency report and the other documents referenced above here:
http://lenr-canr.org
This site has ~1,000 original source documents, and a bibliography of 2,500 others.
Let me address a few of the claims made here by Roger Zimmerman:
“But, what Pons and Fleischmann did NOT do was hide their data and methodology from their peers. Indeed, the first attempts to replicate their experiments were underway within weeks, if not days. There were occasional hints of success, along with many failures, and P-F were in close communication with those scientists trying to replicate. Ultimately the consensus was formed that the results must have derived from experimental error . . .”
That is incorrect. By 1990, 20 experiments in the U.S. had failed for reasons by then well understood, but these were far outnumbered by over 100 that succeeded. The 20 that failed were run only once, whereas some successful experiments had been dozens of times, for example in a 10 x 10 array of cells. EPRI concluded that “This work confirms the claims of Fleischmann, Pons, and Hawkins of the production of excess heat in deuterium-loaded palladium cathodes at levels too large for chemical transformation.”
Experts in electrochemistry and calorimetry such as Heinz Gerischer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin concluded that there are “undoubtedly overwhelming indications that nuclear processes take place in the metal alloys.”
Some of these results were “hints” of success, but others were far above any conceivable error limit, such as tritium ranging from 50 to several million times background, and heat at 10 to 100 W, often with no input power, continuing thousands of times longer than any conceivable chemical reaction would allow.
“Now, the general field of ‘Cold Fusion’ is not dead, but the adherents/proponents are arguably scientific zealots/pariahs proceeding outside the main stream, and probably without any substantial public money.”
It is quite the opposite. Most cold fusion researchers are powerful, mainstream scientists, such as the former head of BARC and later the Atomic Energy Commission, the French Atomic Energy commissioner who was the lead designer of their fission power reactors; the heat of the Japanese top Tokamak lab; and the editors of two leading plasma fusion journals; and two Nobel laureates in physics. The reason this field is top-heavy in distinguished scientists is simple: it is very controversial and there is tremendous political opposition, so only scientists with clout can do the research. A junior member of the faculty would never be funded.
Also there is substantial public money in Italy and China, but not in the U.S. The Defense Intelligence Agency paper recommends more funding.
“It will certainly take extraordinary proof and crystal clear presentation of the evidence to overcome this status. But, I think it is a possibility, assuming that these methodological principles are followed.”
They have been followed in the case of cold fusion. The evidence for it is overwhelming. The experiment has been replicated successfully roughly 17,000 times, according to a tally made at the Inst. Of High Energy Physcics, Chinese Ac. Of Sciences.
“This story vividly demonstrates that the scientific method of radical skepticism works . . .”
In the case of cold fusion, blind, ignorant skepticism has prevented a rational analysis. People believe mythology and ignore the peer-reviewed literature. Please do not depend on mass media reports, or Internet rumors. You should read original source scientific papers. I went to a lot of trouble to make them available on line, so please read ‘em!
December 2, 2009, 6:38 pmLib says:
Isn’t that the crux of the problem?
If I recall correctly, Fleischmann and Pons did specify how they had achieved cold fusion. Given that information, others tried to repeat their results and were unable to do so. As a result, their conclusions were discredited. No one had to even try to prove that cold fusion was impossible – they simply showed that Fleischmann and Pons almost certainly hadn’t achieved cold fusion using the technique they described so their results were “uncitable” as evidence of cold fusion.
How, without knowing how Jones et al came up with their results (which data they discarded, which they used, which they adjusted) and a formal statement of the models (or, the code implementing those models if they are willing to release that) can anyone refute their claims?
It’s possible (in my mind, highly likely) that we just don’t understand the complex process of global climate changes enough to model them (or have the necessary historical data to crank into the model) to anywhere near the degree of certainty that some in the “AGW community” claim.
If this is the case, it is as equally impossible to prove that AGW won’t have dire effects as it is to prove it will – but that certainly doesn’t prove AGW is a dire problem. That burden of proof still is with those making the claim and CRU seems to be unwilling to release enough information to allow their claims to be refuted — very suspicious behavior to my mind.
December 2, 2009, 6:45 pmwfjag says:
MGA says:
And MGA reveals what really happened – ClimateGate is a conspiracy to “save or create” thousands of jobs of young climate scientists whose degrees are now worthless since no one is hiring, but, now they can be hired to re-collect and re-create (or re-manipulate) the “raw data” that’s gone missing, and review the computer codes of the various climate models. So, ClimateGate is really just a conspiracy to extend government control by showing that government control does not work!
[Actually, given all the boondoggle “saved or created” jobs from the Stimulus (and I mean those that actually exist, not the imaginary ones), doing this might be an improvement. If the young grads get proper supervision, they might actually learn how to do the tasks correctly and that could be valuable for future research).]
sureyoubet says:
Do you want the real reason or the snarky reason?
The snarky reason (which some of the comments to the VC ClimateGate postings show has a basis in reality) is that AGW has taken on many aspects of a religion for some of its adherents. We haven’t gotten to a mass suicide to save the world as the Mother Ship passes Earth hidden in the tail of a comet, along the lines of Heaven’s Gate (just yet). But, well, you judge the tenor of some of the comments in relation to how reasonable they appear to be. Earth First!!
The real reason is the control of $Trillions. The initial estimates for implementation of the Kyoto were that the non-productive costs would be between $300 Trillion and $451 Trillion (there being some dispute over what should be considered non-productive) to achieve the result of reducing the increase in the average global temperature by 1 degree C by the end of the century, in light of predictions by the computer models whose purported error bands ranged from 1.5 to 2.7 degrees C. (Meaning you couldn’t tell if the reduction in the increase in temperature was real or measurement error). And, also assuming that neither China nor India – nor any other developing nation –would significantly increase their emissions of CO2 or other GHGs.
The proposed Cap and Trade bill pending in Congress will (according to preliminary estimates — we all know how accurate those turn out) cost in excess of $1 Trillion, and will not actually result in any reduction of CO2 emissions. Accordingly, additional measures will be required — adding additional costs. A $Trillion here and a $Trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
So, what approach would you expect? The Chicken Little, “the sky is falling, we’re all doomed if you don’t do what I day” approach, or the “there will be some problems and some benefits, but, nothing we can’t handle” approach?
December 2, 2009, 6:49 pmJohn Moore says:
A couple of points…
The best experiments done in the P&F era were all negative. I know of no reproducible experiments to date that actually produce significant amounts of positive energy (the claim of P&F), although I stopped following the field closely after it became clear that the P&F experiments were wrong.
There have been some suggestive experiments over the years that perhaps very low levels of “cold fusion” are happening, which was the Jones hypothesis (his results were released on the same day as P&F, but since he didn’t claim energy gains they were ignored in the press).
Back to P&F…
These were respected electro-chemists (battery dudes, essentially) who realized that a mathematical expression for “pressure” rose to extremely high values with the adsorption of hydrogen into metals (although physicists pointed out that the “pressure” in this case was not true pressure and was irrelevant). Based on this beer-inspired insight, they constructed an experiment using hydrolysis cells to cause that adsorption. They used D2O instead of H2O since such “pressure” would then cause fusion. They measured a high energy gain (gain, like the positive feedback needed for AGW) after running their cells for weeks.
When their paper became available (some time after the public announcement), it became immediately obvious that they had calculated that gain by the scientific sin of dividing by the difference of two close values, one of which was highly error prone. Hence the gain was an arithmetic exaggeration.
As their experimental method became known, major sources of error became immediately obvious, including:\
*(duh) running a D2O cell in the open atmosphere rapidly turns it into an H2O cell via normal diffusion processes
*using open cells meant that a calculation was required for the heat carried off by evaporated water – an error-prone calculation
*the placement of the temperature sensing probes (I think they used themocouples) greatly affected the temperature measured – they were not measuring the average temperature of a cell
and others
Basically, it was a very sloppy piece of work.
A number of experimenters, including physicists, chemists and engineers rushed to duplicate their apparent success. Not surprisingly (and diagnostic of pseudo-science), the more careful experiments produced the least, or no, excess heat. The best experiment I know of was done by an instrumentation physicist from Fermilab, who ran a careful closed-cell calorimetry experiment, with rapid and continuous sampling and recording of all parameters. He did this in his basement, btw. His results were strongly convincing: no excess heat.
The good news was that P&F made enough information available that their experiments (and many variations) could be tested. The bad news is that the CRU said the dog ate their data.
As for cold fusion beyond that (and I leave out the Jones story), there has been fringe activity ever since.
There continues to be some government funding, both because low level cold fusion would be interesting if confirmed, and the much less likely high level cold fusion would be revolutionary.
There are also various private groups that have been funding this for a long time. AFAIK P&F are still at it, somewhere.
It has been 20 years since the first experiment, and nobody has been able to repeatedly produce significant amounts of excess energy. If they had, they would be extremely wealthy.
The referenced DIA report (see the link) is full of “if’s.” Interestingly, its list of work and “successes” looks no different from what was being produced in 1990… various claims of transmutation, low levels of neutron or other radiation, various claims of excess heat – by various scientists around the world.
It is possible, but unlikely, that the “consensus science” bias (and it is real) against publishing any but the most convincing papers on cold fusion is suppressing actual success.
Possible, but unlikely.
The
December 2, 2009, 7:07 pmKevin P. says:
LOL, awesome! Who is the denialist here?
December 2, 2009, 7:20 pmloki13 says:
I’ve been avoiding these threads because of the crazines (on both sides, but mainly one…), but I would like to point out the following:
1. Anyone who is involved in litigation (discovery) knows that if you go through enough emails, you’ll find something that looks bad, even if there was no underlying problem.
2. That said, I certainly think the issues that have been brought to light require further investigation- as one climate researcher noted, it is important to have complete transaprency, to be holier than thou.
3. I have been amazed over the past 10 years to see the shifting rationale used by people who are skeptical of the AGW. The argument changed from “It’s not occuring” to “It’s occuring, but not caused by man” to “It’s occuring, and caused by man, but it’s not very bad” to “It’s occuring, and caused by man, and could be bad, but it might be expensive to fix” to “It’s occuring, it’s caused by man, it’s probably expensive, but, hey, didn’t they used to grow wine in England?” The shfting arguments show an inability to really try and deal with the problem, and, instead, to ostrich it away.
4. As an aside, I do believe that as a general rule, this should be put to more rigorous cost-benefit analyses, which is why skeptics should be putting money into their own climate studies and mitigation.
5. I think this does act as a Rorschach test for both sides; this is now (for true believers) a matter of identity. I’m not much invested either way other than vaguely hopeful my children don’t have to put up with this crap- I just want the right answer. I find it amazing that some people ignore the continuing waves of evidence that continue to come in and support AGW (or, at least, GW) from the other sciences, incl. the effects it has on migration patterns, not to mention the evidence in front of their eyes if they’re beyond their teen years and spend much time outside. But somehow finding that one of the main datasets may have problems (not does, may)…. well, there’s two others. But it’s just a giant conpiracy, right? Of evil grant-grubbing climate scientists and various government employees?
6. Belief is a powerful thing. It is alway amazing to me to see the same people immediately launch into attacks on Al Gore (because his existence means what, exactly?) or claim that “the left” can’t be serious about AGW because of nukes (um…. conflation of issues; there are many, including this poster, that would love to see increased use of nuclear power as a means to further energy independence regardless of AGW). Instead of falling into the same old tropes, perhaps it would be productive to find the common ground on which *reasonable* people can agree- transparency, rigorous application of the scientific method, and application of cost/benefit for AGW where appropriate (while including premium for risk).
December 2, 2009, 8:09 pmShelbyC says:
And which one depends on your perspective of course. :-)
December 2, 2009, 8:15 pmsteve says:
David Schwartz and Lib- I think I fail to make myself clear. There are two parts here. Is there warming? Is it anthropogenic? The first can and should, I believe be verified. Many skeptics claim there is no warming at all, so there is no need for further study. I think this is best verified by going back to original data sources, not using data from CRU or anyone else’s already predetermined set. Go through the data, figure out which is appropriate, do the necessary corrections and present the results. Assume nothing.
As to the second, is it your claim that it is impossible to model climates so we should not even try? Possible I concede, but then how would we prove any scientific assertion? I would prefer two approaches here. First, the skeptics take the existing models and correct them as they deem proper. Then add in the data which they think appropriate. Publish. Then let the AGW people critique. Next, I would hope that some skeptics would be willing to write their own de novo model. Add data, publish. Critique. I think that down this path we arrive at the best possible answers. Otherwise we end up with the skeptics making the same fallacious claim some, not as many as claimed but a real number, AGW make, that this is settled science.
Steve
December 2, 2009, 8:17 pmloki13 says:
Well, I was going with overall volume. While, inter alia, operationcounterstrike is certainly bringing the crazy for pro-AGW, and zuch is well-represented, I think I am safe when I say that the majority of posts on most of these threads (especailly the early ones) were anti-AGW.
December 2, 2009, 8:32 pmJohn Moore says:
You seem to have a selection bias in your choice of skeptics.
I know of no serious sceptics who have denied the CO2->warming connection. The debate in that regard is about the climate sensitivity, with the warming side claiming major amplification of the effect via feedback. There have also been few serious skeptics who doubt that the earth’s temperature has risen since the little ice age, although the alarmists have shifted their position from agreement on that to “look what I did, Ma – I made the little ice age and the midieval warming period go away.”
The claim that there has been warming clearly due to CO2 is still, properly disputed. The “hockey stick” is so significant because it purports to show a warming that the models could find no other cause for, so “it must be AGW” became the mantra of the warmists. Unfortunately for the warmists, the warming went away except in the most unreliable and tweakable measurements: surface temp.
Now we find they’ve been fudging the surface temp data, and hiding the decline in one of their smoking (drooping?) guns – tree ring proxies.
December 2, 2009, 8:39 pmGuest12345 says:
I think that anyone who wants to tell us what the temperature is going to be like in 2050 will first need to take their model and reset the clock to 1950 and demonstrate that it can accurately recreate recorded history. If they can’t do that then they should rightly be regarded as a charlatain. If they can do that then the argument is over.
December 2, 2009, 8:44 pmtamerlane says:
I decided to look into the questions I posed earlier in as painless a manner as possible by googling “+arima +global +temperature”. I suggest that other posters check out the results that come up. They’re quite revealing.
There’s some fascinating peer-review literature out there by professionals with a knowledge of statistics — in this case methods of time-series analysis — who look at global temperature data. The bottom line is that the peer-review articles that pop up seem universally to find that there is at best very weak evidence for any trend in global temperature from satelite data; the time-series are best modeled as a random walk; fluctuations correlate with fluctuations in solar radiation; and there is essentially no correlation with variations in atmospheric concentrations of CO2.
My question is why haven’t these easily accessible statistical analyses played a more prominent role in the current debate? It’s as if physicists at the beginning of the century were debating the relevance of Special Relativity while ignoring the Nichelson-Morley experiments.
December 2, 2009, 8:45 pmJed Rothwell says:
You wrote:
“The best experiments done in the P&F era were all negative.”
That is incorrect. The best experiments were at Los Alamos, China Lake, TAMU, Hokkaido U., SRI and Osaka U. and they were positive. They took many months to perform and were not reported until 1990. The 20 experiments that failed in 1989 got a lot of press coverage but they were not done correctly.
“I know of no reproducible experiments to date that actually produce significant amounts of positive energy (the claim of P&F) . . .”
The peer-reviewed literature list thousands of positive experiments. Some produced 50 to 300 MJ from a few grams of material. This is far more than Fleischmann and Pons originally reported, and it is 10,000 to 100,000 times more than any conceivable chemical reaction with this mass of materials.
If you “do not know of” these experiments I suggest you read the literature.
“. . . although I stopped following the field closely after it became clear that the P&F experiments were wrong.”
They were not wrong. This is a myth. If they had been wrong there would not be 2,000 or so professional scientists claiming they replicated the experiments, using a wide range of instruments, and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers describing positive replications. The only way you can determine whether a claim is right or wrong is to see whether it is replicated or not. This is the only standard of truth in experimental science. Cold fusion has met this standard.
“There have been some suggestive experiments over the years that perhaps very low levels of “cold fusion” are happening . . .”
The levels are high, not low. It is very easy to confirm that a cell is producing 100 W of heat for hours with no input power, or 10E18 atoms of tritium.
“These were respected electro-chemists (battery dudes, essentially) who realized that a mathematical expression for “pressure” rose to extremely high values with the adsorption of hydrogen into metals (although physicists pointed out that the “pressure” in this case was not true pressure and was irrelevant). Based on this beer-inspired insight, they constructed an experiment using hydrolysis cells to cause that adsorption.”
They never said anything like that. On the contrary, in the NSF and Congressional testimony they say the deuterons are farther apart in the lattice than in D2O. In any case, cold fusion effects have been reported sporadically since 1927, and by several researchers, including nuclear scientists, prior to F&P in the 1980s, so this is a purely experimental discovery, not theory based.
“When their paper became available (some time after the public announcement) . . .”
It was available on the day of the announcement. That is why they held the announcement that day.
“*(duh) running a D2O cell in the open atmosphere rapidly turns it into an H2O cell via normal diffusion processes”
The cells are closed to the atmosphere. Electrochemically open cells go through bubbulers or use other methods to prevent atmospheric contamination. Most electrochemical experiments are poisoned by air, and everyone knows that cold fusion is. (Except that in some of the 20 failed experiments that you consider “good” they did not take precautions to exclude air.) Fleischmann is a leading experts in electrochemistry. He literally wrote the book on this subject, so he is aware of this problem.
“*using open cells meant that a calculation was required for the heat carried off by evaporated water — an error-prone calculation”
This is completely wrong. In any case this would underestimate excess enthaply if it were true.
“*the placement of the temperature sensing probes (I think they used themocouples) greatly affected the temperature measured — they were not measuring the average temperature of a cell”
Incorrect. .They used an array of 6 to 10 sensors, and others used multiple sensors inside the cell, or at the cell wall. Still other used flow or Seebeck calorimeters. The effect you describe has not been observed because electrolysis alone stirs the cell, and in any case most people use magnetic stirrers. Plus, in early 1989 Fleischmann dropped some red dye in a cell (a control) on video, and showed that electrolysis alone rapidly mixes the electrolyte.
“Basically, it was a very sloppy piece of work.”
No, it was superb. Thousands of experts who replicated agree with me on that. Oriani, for example, said it was the best and most challenging experiment he did in his 50-year career.
“A number of experimenters, including physicists, chemists and engineers rushed to duplicate their apparent success. Not surprisingly (and diagnostic of pseudo-science), the more careful experiments produced the least, or no, excess heat.”
That is wrong. The best experiments with the best equipment was at SRI, and it had a very high s/n ratio, with up to 300% excess, about 1000 times beyond the limits of chemistry as I recall. The best yet done using the most precise instruments were reported a few months ago. They were done by the NRL. The worked, several hundred times in a row. The s/n ratio is very high.
“The best experiment I know of was done by an instrumentation physicist from Fermilab . . .”
If you mean Tom Droege then I must point out that his cathode was covered with galvanized cat hair. I saw it myself. Letting filth into the cell will prevent the reaction. As you noted, even air will poison the reaction. Cat fur is definitely out. That was not a good experiment.
“AFAIK P&F are still at it, somewhere.”
No, they are not.
“It has been 20 years since the first experiment, and nobody has been able to repeatedly produce significant amounts of excess energy.”
The peer-reviewed literature proves you are wrong.
“If they had, they would be extremely wealthy.”
On the contrary, people who replicated often got in trouble. Miles, for example, was a Fellow of China Lake and one of the most distinguished electrochemists. When he reported success they reassigned him to a job as a stock clerk and then fired him. There is tremendous academic political opposition to this research, as I said.
I do not know where you are getting your information but you are incorrect. I strongly recommend you stick to original source, peer-reviewed scientific information and stop repeating these rumors and this unfounded nonsense.
December 2, 2009, 8:49 pmgeokstr says:
Funny, that, it’s the same reason I try to avoid posts where commenters named after minor gods seem to show up a lot…
December 2, 2009, 8:55 pmsteve says:
Guest-
I agree.
December 2, 2009, 9:01 pmJed Rothwell says:
John Moore wrote:
“It is possible, but unlikely, that the “consensus science” bias (and it is real) against publishing any but the most convincing papers on cold fusion is suppressing actual success.
Possible, but unlikely.”
Cold fusion researchers feel there is bias. For example, Julian Schwinger wrote:
“The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.”
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf
I have letters from the editors at Nature, Scientific American and elsewhere in which they admit what I consider a publication bias. Heck, not admit — they brag about it. That is to say, they assert that all of the researchers are frauds, criminals, and “Branch Davidian” lunatics. They say that although they have not read a single paper on this subject, they are certain all of the claims are wrong. They reject all papers without review, and in their editorials starting in mid-1989, they called for more ridicule and “unqualified vituperation.” They also make astounding technical errors, and they violated academic ethics, for example, by letting a critic of cold fusion peer-review and reject letters pointing out errors in his analysis. If that is not a bias, I cannot imagine what would be. You can read the letters and papers by skeptics at LENR-CANR.org and judge for yourself.
I know nothing about this climate dispute, and I would NEVER make assertions about research that I have not read carefully. But I have noted that journalists seemed surprised at some aspects of academic politics. This is naive. Someone at The Atlantic wrote:
“There is strong evidence that a small group of scientists has inappropriate power over the process of consensus-building. Particularly, they seem to have exercised considerable sway over the peer review process at prominent outlets, while simultaneously deriding their critics because . . . they weren’t being published in those peer reviewed journals.”
I have been involved in academic research as a translator and student for a long time, and I know hundreds of scientists in various fields. They all report this sort of thing. These tactics have been used quite successfully against cold fusion. If the accusations prove true, I will not be a bit surprised.
December 2, 2009, 9:25 pmDavid Schwartz says:
loki13: I change my mind when the facts contradict what I previously believed. What do you recommend? (By the way, I’m personally back to not being convinced there has been overall real warming because of the lost credibility in the CRU data and the recent lack of warming.)
In any event, what do you think is wrong with this view? Someone says: because of A, B. And because of B, C. And because of C, D. Do you think that if A turns out to be right, we somehow have to give them the benefit of the doubt about the rest of the chain? Doesn’t it make sense to attack the chain from the beginning to the end? And isn’t the final conclusion valid only when the entire chain is validated?
steve: I’m assuming your first point is about determining whether there has been warming in the past and your second point about predicting the future.
As to the first, it cannot be done. I’ve posted the various reasons previously and linked to them previously, in this thread I think. To get a sense of the past global ground temperature, you need a network of ground stations that didn’t exist back then. And even if you assume the stations we have now are good enough, they are also different enough from the ones in the past so as to make the data incomparable at the level of detail needed. I’ve repeated this argument in detail at least twice now.
As to the second, it cannot be done if the first cannot be done. The only way to know if our models are accurate is to demonstrate that if we leave out some data, they correct produce that data. But we don’t have enough data. The models we produced with the data we did have ten years ago failed to accurate predict this decade. If we fix them, we won’t know if that fixed anything for at least a decade.
I’m sorry, we can’t predict the future yet. All the arguments about how we need to won’t change that. We just don’t know and don’t know any way to know.
December 2, 2009, 9:33 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
loki13,
I have been amazed over the past 10 years to see the shifting rationale used by people who are skeptical of the AGW. The argument changed from “It’s not occurring” to “It’s occurring, but not caused by man” to “It’s occurring, and caused by man, but it’s not very bad” to “It’s occurring, and caused by man, and could be bad, but it might be expensive to fix” to “It’s occurring, it’s caused by man, it’s probably expensive, but, hey, didn’t they used to grow wine in England?” The shifting arguments show an inability to really try and deal with the problem, and, instead, to ostrich it away.
Look, we have what ought to be several separate questions here. One is what’s happening to the climate. Another is what’s causing it. A third is how it will affect us. A fourth is what (if anything) we can do to change the probable course of events, supposing we want to.
None of these ought to be political questions. Politics comes in after the fourth item, when we decide which is the best course of action given our situation and our options. At least, that’s how it ought to work; what actually happened is that a lot of people leapt from the first and second items to “we must do THIS NOW,” and branded anyone who argued otherwise a “denier.”
In fact, whether GW is A[nthropogenic] should have nothing to do with what, if anything, we ought to do about it. We don’t decide how to respond to an earthquake or a tsunami based on whether we think it was caused by human activity. The practical questions are what’s happening, what it means for us, and what (if anything) we can do, supposing that we want to do anything.
December 2, 2009, 9:52 pmRoger Zimmerman says:
I added the Cold Fusion story to this thread to emphasize that the original proponents, whether reluctantly or not (and in spite of their ill-advised decision to go to the popular press prematurely), did abide by the basic principles of the scientific method and thereby were fundamentally in pursuit of the truth. I admit to learning what I know of the “outcome” of this search largely from secondary sources, though many of them are good scientists. So, I may be wrong about that, as per Jed Rothwell. And, it may be that subsequently, the Cold Fusion field _has_ slid over into the realm of politics trumping truth seeking, and perhaps to the unfair detriment of the advocates.
But, if so, this does not negate the point that the only way to possibly arrive at the truth is to rigorously support these principles: make all raw data available, make all methods perfectly clear, work hard to allow skeptics the opportunity to replicate your results. If Cold Fusion does come to fruition, it will be because of real scientists that adhere to this process.
The warmists would have to start all over again – with a brand new attitude – to gain that mantle.
December 2, 2009, 9:54 pmloki13 says:
David,
There hasn’t been the release of any “facts” to change my mind. As I pointed out before, if all of AGW was based on this, then, yes, my beliefs would be different. But:
1. This is the beginning of an iquiry into CRU, not the dispositive repudiation of their work. But assuming it is, then,
2. We have two other, independent (American) datasets. They reach much the same conclusions, and
3. There is evidence from other branches of science that confirm a general warming, by examining, inter alia, the behavior of plants and animals that are affected by temperatures.
Anyway, for me, I tend to believe in the following:
a. There’s a great deal of science backing up AGW. You may or may not believe it.
b. There’s criticism of individual aspects of AGW, some of which are valid, but nothing in th way of alternative theories that explain what’s going or predicting the climate to stay the same.
c. I think rational corporations follow their own interests. Large companies that prefer to stay in hydrocarbons would have an interest in creating FUD in order to continue making money off off hydrocarbons for as long as possible; insurance companies, OTOH, who have an interest in accurately modeling their payouts, would be more inclined to have an accurate estimate. Which is why those industries are reacting in very different ways.
d. Finally, none of this answers the more normative question of what we should do. I’m not a big believer in this “mother gaia” stuff. The earth doesn’t care about us- if we screw it up too badly, we’ll be screwed. So it becomes a politcal and economic question, one which is informed by the science, which sould be done in an open and transparent manner. And that’s what I hope the end result of this is.
Quite frankly, I wouldn’t be bothered at all if I found out tomorrow AGW was the giant conspiracy/hoax geokstrisnky makes it out to be. I don’t mind being wrong (although I would be surprised- I find that conspiracy theories are almost always bogus). I also don’t think that if every single scientist in the world, combined with the heads of ExxonMobil, the DoD, and Romald Reagan’s Rotting Corpse came out and said that AGW was real and would destory the world in 200 years it would make a difference to hardcore skeptics- there’d just be something else to equivocate over.
Because the sad thing, there’s a few on both sides that evidence matters to not at all, and both sides cavalierly point at the other side saying, “You, sir, won’t listen to any evidence!”
December 2, 2009, 9:57 pmjccamp says:
Headline from der Spiegel Online –
“Climate Change’s Clear Winners
Europe’s Wild Boar Population Exploding”
A quote from the article: “Wild boars are the clear winners of climate change and of the change in nature caused by humans,”
Feral pigs, wild hogs, whatever you call them, are also a problem in parts of the U S, but the population growth is mainly attributed (in the U S) to lack of predation (coupled with the pigs’ intelligence and adaptability). Wild hogs (in most parts of the U S) have no natural enemies, nothing that subsists by predation upon them. There are not sufficient surviving large carnivores to influence pig population levels.
Funny how the concept of AGW has taken hold, in this example despite the article’s content that suggests large scale commercial maize farming – intended for biofuel in classic irony – has actually led to or contributed to the growth in Europe’s boar population. The article’s author and the quoted biologist both apparently accept without question the existence of AGW and its influence on large mammal populations.
I’m not sure what lesson is to be learned, but I didn’t realize how pervasive this belief in AGW had become.
Article here with a great photo of a boar wallowing in the mud, certainly apropos of something or another discussed in these few GW threads, depending on your point of view.
December 2, 2009, 9:57 pmBob from Ohio says:
Loki, if you are doing discovery and find:
letter or e-mail from senior manager stating that important data will be destroyed if a FOIA request is made
important data is in fact destroyed
claim is made that e-mail was “joke”
What is the effect on the litigation?
December 2, 2009, 10:00 pmzuch says:
No. To be equivalent, it would be: “Honest people with nothing to hide give everything to the opposing party.”
Cheers,
December 2, 2009, 10:19 pmRichard Aubrey says:
What is it the deniers are supposed to prove?
December 2, 2009, 10:24 pmTheir question is…prove warming is happening. That turns out to be difficult, and some of the folks involved such as at CRU, have shown suspicious actions around the subject.
If you can’t show warming is happening, you haven’t got a story.
You could model future warming, but it seems clear you could model future cooling if you were as sloppy as NASA and CRU have been, and if you wanted to.
The question about predicting 1950 successfully is so on point that hardly anybody asks it. It’s embarrassing.
The deniers, the skeptics, are asking for proof.
You don’t need to prove anything when asking somebody prove an assertion.
David Schwartz says:
We obviously reason very differently about this issue. Of course it would make no difference what conclusion every scientist endorsed.
I could refute you point-by-point, but there’s no point. Your argument is irrefutable, you have dozens and dozens of weak arguments and figure they must somehow sum up to a strong one, and I can only rebut them one by one.
December 2, 2009, 10:49 pmJohn Moore says:
Jed Rothwell writes:
Then he quote’s my friend’s adviser, Julian Schwinger.
Yes, I’m sure there is bias. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” is a statement of bias.
I also seriously doubt the claims of the cold fusion folks, based on my own experience with the early phase of the controversy. Note I say “doubt” – they might be right. I just doubt it really strongly, and in this case they, like the global warmists, are the ones making the extraordinary claims. The difference is that the warmists have captured the controversy, while the fusionists have failed to do so.
December 2, 2009, 11:14 pmJed Rothwell says:
Roger Zimmerman says:
“But, if so, this does not negate the point that the only way to possibly arrive at the truth is to rigorously support these principles: make all raw data available, make all methods perfectly clear, work hard to allow skeptics the opportunity to replicate your results.”
Cold fusion researchers agree wholeheartedly! In April 2009, CBS “60 Minutes” broadcast a segment on cold fusion. They asked one of the top U.S. experts in calorimetry, Prof. Robert Duncan to look at some experiments. He knew nothing about cold fusions going in. After visiting a few labs he was completely convinced that the claims are true. In one experiment, input is a fraction of a watt and output is 20 W, which is an astronomical difference by the standards of modern calorimetry. As he puts it, we can measure picowatts, and the people doing cold fusion at SRI, the Navy in in Israel (where he visited) have the best calorimeters money can buy. So this is highly convincing. That’s what he said on “60 Minutes,” without the technical details. Anyway, a few months later he described what happened as a result of his appearance on “60 Minutes,” in a video lecture at U. Missouri:
“. . . This negative reaction resulted in what I consider to be a loss . . . a lack of objectivity. When I went on the 60 Minutes piece, I was contacted by a highly prominent professor from an Ivy League university, who was just really [laughs], really was angry with me. For having done the piece. And the point was, I laid out the scientific case [to the prof on the phone] but he flatly wouldn’t consider it. And when I said, ‘come on, why don’t you just work with me here, through the data,’ he said essentially, ‘well, you know, us high caliber physicists have done that before, and there has never been anything there. So you charlatans just can go on and do whatever you like.’ Okay. Well. It is interesting: my scientific reputation — I guess, at least to him — had been stronger before I did the piece.
But now, the point is, real science, possibly with outstanding engineering consequences, suddenly becomes a pariah science. A science where no one can go . . .”
His PowerPoint slides conclude:
“Research funding needs to become less dependent on the common assumptions within the culture of scientific communities, and much more courageous and objective.
The Scientific Method is a wonderful thing, use it always, no exceptions!”
http://www.lenr-canr.org/News.htm
“If Cold Fusion does come to fruition, it will be because of real scientists that adhere to this process.”
Absolutely! And fortunately most of cold fusion researchers are “real scientists.” As I said, they are top heavy in Nobel laureates, Fellows of the Royal Society, Distinguished Professor of this and that. Arata, one the top people, has an international award in his name, a building at Osaka National University named after him, about 100 industrial patents, and two awards from the Emperor of Japan. As I said, if these people were not science V.I.P.s they would have been fired years ago. A lot of researchers were fired, such as Miles. Fortunately he got a job elsewhere. And, as it happens, a few months ago the Navy asked him pretty please come back to China Lake to continue his cold fusion experiments, which I think he will do. I think the Navy, the Defense Intelligence Agency and CBS are having an effect. I know about 150 top notch scientists in the military who are quite certain cold fusion is real, such as the director of SPAWAR. This field has many enemies, but also a few friends.
As I said, the Scientific American, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Nature, several APS top brass people and various others accuse the researchers of being lunatics and criminals. That makes it hard to get a grant, as you can imagine. Plus there is a member of Congress who likes to grandstand by hauling them in for fraud investigations. He demands copies of old tax returns and personal correspondence and so on. Over the last 35 years I have often seen that kind of behavior in academic science. They play politics for keeps. They routinely publish ad hominem attacks that in any other line of work would result in a lawsuit. So I am not surprised at the brouhaha in climate research. I cannot judge the technical claims but the dirty politics are exactly what I expect from academic scientists.
Incidentally, just because scientists play dirty tricks, that does not mean their research is wrong. They tend to be more honest about science than interpersonal relationships. Starting the day after the 1989 announcement, the plasma fusion scientists were scurrying around trying to have Fleischmann and Pons arrested. (I kid you not.) They were also heckling and ridiculing people trying to lecture, publishing outlandish personal attacks in the newspapers which almost got a Boston Globe reporter fired, but fortunately he had a tape recording. They were soon celebrating the “death of cold fusion” in a party at MIT, and one them I suspect was the person who dumped horse manure into a cold fusion experiment and the mailbox of the prof conducting it. But that does not mean their own plasma fusion experiments are fraudulent. It just means they are bunch of jerks, which is normal for scientists.
These mass media sources not only attack the researchers personally, they also publish misinformation about the experiments, such as the claims repeated here by John Moore. So it is no surprise that Moore and other have picked up this stuff. That is why it is important to read original sources from unbiased, peer-reviewed journals, or the material published directly by SPAWAR, China Lake, the NRL, Los Alamos or BARC. (We have hundreds of pages from these places because Uncle Sam does not copyright his stuff.) Fortunately, there are some unbiased journals. The peer-review process at these journals is arduous but fair. (I have participated in the process as a translator, not an author. They make authors jump through hoops, which is good.) The internal peer-review at the ENEA, Los Alamos, BARC and places like that is as rigorous as any journal.
December 2, 2009, 11:14 pmzuch says:
<blockquote cite="comment-699027"
lucia: JHA linked to the APS, not Reynolds
… as did Reynolds, with his typical failure to provide any additional information content (which is one of the reasons why I chided him for his “heh” propensity).
But I’d say that if all of the maxims of “how scientific inquiry is supposed to proceed” is summed up in those two line items of the APS (and they never make such a grandiose claim), then we’re in for a world of hurt.
Cheers,
December 2, 2009, 11:21 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
zuch,
To be equivalent, it would be: “Honest people with nothing to hide give everything to the opposing party.”
Is that your idea of how scientists funded by the public ought to view FOI/FOIA requests?
December 2, 2009, 11:29 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Jed: Unfortunately, scientists tend to be ill-equipped to deal with deliberate deception. The incident with Robert Duncan was a very sad one. He took their word that they were measuring what they claimed they were measuring, and he mistook his confirmation that the measurements were accurate for confirmation that what they claimed they were measuring had the values they measured.
I can make a box with a battery and a resistor in it. Lo and behold, more heat will come out than you put in. Many chemical reactions will do the same thing. (Throw a match at a house and you may get a lot more heat out than you put in.) And you can measure the heat out and the heat in as expertly as you want to “verify” my results.
Had he suddenly (and unknown to the researchers in advance) produced a helium detector and asked to add that to their apparatus, he would have likely reached a very different conclusion.
Really, he should have asked for sufficient details of their experiment to reproduce it himself from raw materials, and then he should have measured his own experiment.
I think he was expecting, at worst, a Pons and Fleischmann and instead was lead into a straight con.
(At least, this is my best analysis of what seems to have happened based on reports from secondary sources.)
December 2, 2009, 11:33 pmJohn Moore says:
Now I find more stuff by Jed on history that needs refutation… here we go:
No, they were wrong. Their experiment was crap and their calculation of excess heat was done in a very deceptive manner. If you believe their experiment was valid, then no wonder you buy all the other stuff about cold fusion.
[regarding their "pressure" calculation]:
No, they said their initial inspiration was due to the calculated very high pressure resulting from the adsorption. I believe it is in their paper, but I discarded that along with CRU’s research data sometime back.
Actually, people have been examining the thermodynamics of deuterium adsorption into palladium since around 1860. So what? There was a patent issued around 100 years ago for creating helium from hydrogen using palladium. It was nonsense, of course, but matches the transmutation claims of cold fusion folks.
It was not available on the internet. It was published that day. It took awhile for it to get around. It took me awhile to get it (from the Cold Fusion Usenet mailing list that I was on from the start).
Thank you for proving my point. The Pons and Fleischmann cells were open to the air. Like I say, the experiment was crap.
“*using open cells meant that a calculation was required for the heat carried off by evaporated water — an error-prone calculation”
Obviously that depends on how you do the calculations that compensate for it. P&F did those calculations, correctly for simple evaporation, btw, but of course, more than simple evaporation was going on (the cells had bubble formation.
You must live in some alternate universse. The original P&F experiments did not use multiple sensors per cell. Even if they had, it would have been a lousy way to do it. A better way to do a decent job of measuring the small levels of heat they claimed would have been with a well insulated closed cell calorimeter – one where the released D and O were recombined by a catalyst – within the calorimeter. They did not do this.
We were talking about P&F’s original experiments (and the many that followed before I stopped following it). Why would F drop red eye into a cell? Because he did NOT use a stirrer, and he had come under criticism for the placement of the temperature probes (one of a number of valid criticisms). Red dye is hardly a convincing argument about thermal mixing, btw. Red dye diffuses faster than heat.
“A number of experimenters, including physicists, chemists and engineers rushed to duplicate their apparent success. Not surprisingly (and diagnostic of pseudo-science), the more careful experiments produced the least, or no, excess heat.”
What year? When I was following things (and working on my own experiment before it became clear it was a waste of time), SRI hadn’t done anything convincing. A number of folks reported great results, high SNR’s, etc, but then couldn’t reproduce them.
“The best experiment I know of was done by an instrumentation physicist from Fermilab . . .”
I believe it may indeed have been Tom Droege. It doesn’t surprise me that this is now considered a bad experiment by true believers. “Letting filth into the cell will prevent the reaction” is the statement of a true believer, not a scientist – especially since, by your own words, this is an experimental phenomenon, not a theoretical one – which means nobody has a clue whether it may require cat hair (how do you galvanize cat hair, btw?) to work. It’s as likely as anything else in this silly field.
Have you ever read the history of the Polywater Affair? If not, I suggest you do.
Journal Cites? Replication?
“If they had, they would be extremely wealthy.”
You don’t have to be in academia to get wealthy, you know. There are lots and lots of folks with money, and some of them are nuts enough to invest with all sorts of batty “scientists” and others. I’ve seen that myself.
I got my information from the best source at the time: the Usenet news group where most of the folks doing research in this, and a lot of the theoreticians, were hanging outand, of course, the papers that were published (yes, in those infamous peer reviewed journals). Tom Droege (if that’s his name) was just one of many in that group.
I would really like for cold fusion to be a real phenomenon – heck, I was ready to do my own experiments (I still have 100ml of D2O sitting around). However, the odds against it are very long, and your misinformation about the P&F work is not very convincing.
BTW, you should consider, in this regard, that quantum mechanics is the most well verified (if most bizarre) theory in modern physics. There were QM theoreticians all over this at first – looking in every nook and cranny for a way this could be true, and publishing in respected journals. That didn’t last long, because they couldn’t find anything that would stand up to scrutiny, and the experimental data failed to justify continued work (except among a few who wouldn’t give up).
BTW, glad to hear that P&F are no longer still at it. Why did they quit (I guess F would be really old by now, if he is still alive).
According to the Washington Post (via Wikipedia):
Since you have the latest skinny, I’d be curious to know what became of this poor guy.
Also, do you know about the work of Jones (BYU) at the same time, and have any comment on it?
December 2, 2009, 11:39 pmDavid Schwartz says:
John Moore: And to sum it up, and bring it back on topic, both the proponents of AGW and the proponents of cold fusion make the same extraordinary argument — the affects are dramatic and consequential, but we can’t easily show them to you definitively.
December 2, 2009, 11:43 pmJohn Moore says:
Well said, David Schwartz
December 2, 2009, 11:55 pmJohn Moore says:
BTW, checked. It was (the now, late) Tom Droege.
December 3, 2009, 12:05 amJed Rothwell says:
John Moore says:
“I also seriously doubt the claims of the cold fusion folks, based on my own experience with the early phase of the controversy. Note I say “doubt” — they might be right. I just doubt it really strongly . . .”
Unless you have read dozens of papers you have no basis to doubt it really strongly. Or for that matter to believe it. You cannot judge research that you have not read. You cannot do science by ESP. You have to read the papers and think about them carefully. They are not easy to understand.
Plus, it helps to spend time in the labs talking with the researchers and observing experiments. A modicum of hands-on knowledge helps. I am no expert, but when I saw the cat fur galvanized onto Droege’s cathode, it was apparent to me why his experiment failed. (I know it was cat fur because I asked Tom “what on earth is that?” and he told me.) When I saw photos from one of those Leading Experiments you probably had in mind, showing that the cell is open to the air and the physicist running it was holding the cathode with his bare fingers, I knew that one would never work either. (As an electrochemist remarked upon seeing this: “the guy might as well piss into the electrolyte while he’s at it.”) If you think these were “good experiments” then you know nothing about this subject.
I suggest you dial down your confidence. I have seen many scientists jump to foolish and unwarranted conclusions about cold fusion, biology, climate change and other subjects because they did not do their homework. They did not stop and think. They did not reserve judgment. Scientists seem to be as prone to this as anyone. You’d think they would know better.
“Yes, I’m sure there is bias. ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” is a statement of bias.”
It is a statement made for TV. It is pop-science bubblegum. Quoting an unpublished paper by Prof. Melich and me:
This is not a principle of science. It was coined by Carl Sagan for the 1980 “Cosmos” television series. Conventional scientific standards dictate that extraordinary claims are best supported with ordinary evidence from off-the-shelf instruments and standard techniques. All mainstream cold fusion papers present this kind of evidence.
Conventional standards also dictate that all claims and arguments must be held to the same standards of rigor. This includes skeptical assertions that attempt to disprove cold fusion, which have been notably lacking in rigor.
Laplace asserted that “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.” “Weight of evidence” is a measure of how much evidence you have, not how extraordinary it is. There is more evidence for cold fusion than for previously disputed effects. (For example, although there were a few hundred papers published about polywater, most were speculative, and only two labs reported success.)
Finally, the quality of being “extraordinary” is subjective. What seems extraordinary to one person seems ordinary to another. Many scientific phenomena that experts take for granted, such as quantum effects, seemed extraordinary when they were discovered, and still seem extraordinary to non-scientists.
. . .
This discussion may seem off topic, but in fact it is highly germane to the climate controversy. The lesson of cold fusion is that the experts are right, and people who “doubt really strongly” research they know nothing about are wrong. It turns out you have to actually read about the experiment and know what instruments are used and what they show and by golly, you can’t just make stuff up as you go along such as: “nobody has been able to repeatedly produce significant amounts of excess energy.” Because it turns out people have repeatedly produced 50 to 300 MJ from a gadget the size of a coin, which is sealed in a cell without a drop of chemical fuel. 50 MJ is more you get from burning 1 kg of gasoline. Enough to drive a car ~10 miles. Does that sound like a significant amount of energy?
Seriously, where did you get the notion that “nobody has been able to repeatedly produce . . .” bla, bla? Who told you that? Where did you read it? Did you dredge it up from Wikipedia or some other source of anonymous misinformation? I recommend you read conventional, original-source material published by reliable sources such as Toyota or Los Alamos or the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.
For 20 years people have claimed they are sure cold fusion is wrong, and yet none of these self-appointed experts has published a peer-reviewed paper pointing out an error in a major experiment. If they could have found an error, they would have. I have read hundreds of papers on this subject. If there were any like that, I would know about it. In fact, I would upload it. The closest thing to it is here. Read it and judge for yourself:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
December 3, 2009, 12:25 amDavid Schwartz says:
Jed Rothwell: I’m not sure it’s germane, but the parallel is stunning. Your argument is precisely parallel to that of the defenders of AGW. “Where are the papers proving me wrong?” “Go out and reproduce my results and you’ll see I’m right, but I won’t tell you exactly how I did it because it’s a secret.” The interesting question is why this worked for AGW and failed for cold fusion.
December 3, 2009, 12:45 amJed Rothwell says:
John Moore says:
“No, they were wrong.”
Okay, if they were wrong, please explain why thousands of scientists have published ~3,000 papers claiming they replicated it. Are they wrong as well? Thousands of scientists over 20 years, measuring power up to 100 W, and every single one is wrong? If that could happen, the experimental method itself would not work.
“It was available on the day of the announcement. That is why they held the announcement that day.
It was not available on the internet. It was published that day. It took awhile for it to get around.”
Yes. The Internet 20 years ago was still in its infancy, and scientific papers still circulated by mail. And your point is?
“Thank you for proving my point. The Pons and Fleischmann cells were open to the air.”
They emphatically are not. The effluent gas and small orifice at the top ensures there is no air in the cell. This was confirmed at the National Plasma Fusion Center in Nagoya, where they were trying to cause recombination from air deliberately after a boil off. I have seen the cells myself, and learned more about them then I wish I knew. I once spent 3 grueling days with Fleischmann going over how they are calibrated. This is kind of like having to translate Medieval Japanese in a closed book exam. Not something I would care to do twice.
Their second generation boiling cells were closed with a recombiner and condenser, by the way. A reflux condenser, I think it is called.
“You must live in some alternate universse. The original P&F experiments did not use multiple sensors per cell.”
Yes, they did. As I said, I spent several days looking at one. Anyway, Seebeck calorimeters have thousand of thermocouples, and they confirm the excess heat. As do flow calorimeters, bomb calorimeters, IR cameras, and for that matter, sense of touch. That is especially convincing when there is no input energy, with gas loading for example. Plus 6 cells have blown up producing far more energy than the available chemical fuel could have produced, one almost killing a friend of mine.
“Even if they had, it would have been a lousy way to do it.”
I am pretty sure Martin Fleischmann knows more about electrochemical calorimetry than you do.
“We were talking about P&F’s original experiments (and the many that followed before I stopped following it). Why would F drop red eye into a cell? Because he did NOT use a stirrer, and he had come under criticism for the placement of the temperature probes (one of a number of valid criticisms). Red dye is hardly a convincing argument about thermal mixing, btw. Red dye diffuses faster than heat.”
It diffused in an instant. Look here: I have spent hundreds of hours staring at data from cells. Japanese cells, American cells, Israeli cells. I have seen data from probes in the electrolyte, in the walls, in the cooling water, with and without stirrers . . . you name it, I’ve number crunched it. There are NO significant thermal gradients. The temperature anywhere 1 cm or more away from the cathode is uniform. The problem you imagine might have existed did not exist. Fleischmann, of all people, knew that. He knows more about what is happening in an electrochemical cell than just about anyone. (That’s why he was the president of the electochem soc. and an FRS and so on, and why he wrote all those books.) And even if this problem did exist, thousands of subsequent experiments with different instrument types have confirmed that the heat is real and not an artifact.
“The best experiments with the best equipment was at SRI, and it had a very high s/n ratio, with up to 300% excess, about 1000 times beyond the limits of chemistry as I recall.
“What year?”
March 1989 to the present. It is described here:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf
“When I was following things (and working on my own experiment before it became clear it was a waste of time), SRI hadn’t done anything convincing.”
When was this? They probably hadn’t done anything at all, and they certainly did not publish anything. The experiment takes months to set up, and with bulk Pd it takes a couple of months to load. There were no significant results before the end of 1989.
“I believe it may indeed have been Tom Droege. It doesn’t surprise me that this is now considered a bad experiment by true believers. “Letting filth into the cell will prevent the reaction” is the statement of a true believer, not a scientist . . .”
It is the statement of someone who has read at least one book on electrochemistry.
“— especially since, by your own words, this is an experimental phenomenon, not a theoretical one — which means nobody has a clue whether it may require cat hair (how do you galvanize cat hair, btw?)”
The same way you galvanize anything: with electrochemical deposition. I meant that literally: the fur was adhered to the cathode surface. Any material in the electrolyte deposits onto the cathode. Any significant contamination, and especially carbon, will prevent the cold fusion reaction. Cat fur is mostly carbon.
“Have you ever read the history of the Polywater Affair? If not, I suggest you do.”
Yes, I have. I recommend you read Franks, F., Polywater. 1981, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. You will see that it bears no resemblance whatever to cold fusion.
“Journal Cites? Replication?”
For crying out loud I have uploaded a bibliography of 3,500 papers. See for yourself. For a list of the famous failed experiments of 1989 see:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf
“I got my information from the best source at the time: the Usenet news group . . .”
Good grief! The best source? How about Jap. J. Applied Physics or J. Electroanal. Chem.?
“Since you have the latest skinny, I’d be curious to know what became of this poor guy.”
That WaPost report is correct. Pons renounced his citizenship and is living happily in France.
Fleischmann is retired in England. I saw him a few weeks ago in Italy.
?Also, do you know about the work of Jones (BYU) at the same time, and have any comment on it?”
I do now know much about this work, so I hesitate to comment. It has not been replicated to my knowledge.
December 3, 2009, 1:16 amJed Rothwell says:
David Schwartz says:
“I’m not sure it’s germane, but the parallel is stunning. Your argument is precisely parallel to that of the defenders of AGW. “Where are the papers proving me wrong?” “Go out and reproduce my results and you’ll see I’m right, but I won’t tell you exactly how I did it because it’s a secret.’”
Except that it is not a bit secret. As I mentioned, I have uploaded 1,000 papers on this subject, including some hundreds of pages long from U.S. National labs describing what they did. And I have 2,500 others I cannot upload because of copyright restrictions. Plus several hundred in Japanese. At the University of Utah library, they have a collection of papers that fills a small room, which is open to the public. So there are no secrets. On the contrary there is an ocean of information that would take you years to read through.
Most of the research is conducted by national laboratories especially in Italy, and they keep no secrets. I sat through a week of lectures at a recent conference sponsored by the Italian ENEA (their DoE) learning more details than you can imagine.
Again, before you make bold assertions about this subject, such as “it’s a secret” let me suggest you first learn something about it.
December 3, 2009, 1:28 amJohn Moore says:
Okay, then why hasn’t this been commercialized? Like I say, I would realy like this to be true. It just has a very strong signature, of pathological science.
I guess you didn’t bother to read the part where I mentioned the papers. But Usenet *was* the best source, because it was the most timely, and had the liveliest debate. The papers were in the journals, and they were debated on Usenet.
I’ll tell you my test of this cold fusion stuff: commercialization. Either it produces enough excess energy to have commercial potential, or this is all a bunch of hot air (or water). 20 years after P&f made their claims, neither has produced anything the usefully produces energy. That’s very telling. I don’t see big energy companies falling all over themselves to buy into this stuff (and they’ll invest in pretty speculative stuff).
So frankly, I don’t believe it. I haven’t hung around with these guys like you claim to have. Maybe you really are on to the holy grail, and just can’t convince anyone.
It is a fact that science tends to form tribal groups. It is also a fact that when cold fusion experiments first came out, there were a bunch of scientists very eager to get in on it, and a lot of them tried, and a lot failed. There were lots of “here’s thee magic ingredient to make it work” or “here’s the evil spirit you must exorcise before your experiment will work” sorts of claims flying around.
It all is very suspicious.
BTW, if I get some time, maybe I’ll look at some of the papers. Thank you for putting them up there.
I hope they are more accurate than your early history of the original P&F experimental fiasco.
Good luck.
December 3, 2009, 1:49 amJohn Moore says:
One more comment on cold fusion. From your article:
This is classic of pathological science. First we hear that the phenomenon is not well understood and experiments very difficult to repl9icate (very conventient). Then we hear it compared to something else that was difficult experimentally and worked out. There is an applied equivalence.
There is a big problem with that: the transistor was based on known physics. the theory preceded the experiment. Cold fusion does not have that characteristic. It is a mish-mash of claims – this guy gets excess heat; that guy gets reaction products; etc, etc.
December 3, 2009, 1:54 amJohn Moore says:
Sorry, couldn’t resist. The first line is integrated heat over a very long time. This is very susceptible to systematic error, since integrating the calorimeter results means integrating any systemic error. This is one of the problems that showed up early.
As to the craters being evidence of nuclear reactions… hasn’t anyone ever heard of cavitation? Collapsing bubbles in fluids sometimes generate very high temperatures and are well known to damage metal, with little crates.
December 3, 2009, 2:03 amDavid Schwartz says:
Jed Rothwell: You continue to prove me right. CRU said the same thing, “All the data is out there, so we don’t have to provide a way to reproduce results that prove our claims. If you think I’m wrong, prove me right.”
December 3, 2009, 2:08 amwhit says:
i would like to make an analogy. because that’s how i roll.
imagine that (ok, it’s more of a thought experiment) instead of scientists fudging data, these emails revealed cops fudging evidence.
would people like operation counterstrike say:
“The fact is, at least so far, there’s nothing in the emails except cops (scientists) wrangling as cops (scientists) do.”?
i think NOT.
and just like the fact that these scientists were colluding etc. does not mean that anthropogenic global warming is false, the fact that these hypothetical cops collude on a case (destroy exculpatory evidence, fudge evidence, collude on statement) doesn’t mean the guy is actually innocent either.
in both cases, it’s still WRONG.
many (especially on the left) hold scientists in a sort of awe. maybe that’s because so many of these people have degrees in “soft” subjects like sociology, or women’s studies, etc.
i just find it amusing the way some people will jump over backwards to apologize for some obviously corrupt scientists. imo, it’s because 1) the cause is so important (they were doing it for a good cause) and 2) they are SCIENTISTS. who are we to question their big brains!
the reaction to this scandal is really very telling about people’s bias’ and double standards when it comes to the holy war that is the war against global warming ™.
the sad thing would be that 1) global warming is in fact happening, and is in fact largely anthropogenic 2) the fact that these scientists were found to have fudged and colluded makes it less likely that people will accept the truth of (1).
i am truly NOT surprised that scientists would do this. why? because scientists are people. and if there is one thing i have learned in life, it’s that “people are people” and no group, avocation, etc. is immune from basic human weaknesses
December 3, 2009, 3:51 amKen Arromdee says:
If skeptics were being scientific, you’d expect them to change their position as evidence comes in. What’s the problem with this?
December 3, 2009, 9:25 amJed Rothwell says:
John Moore says:
“This is classic of pathological science. First we hear that the phenomenon is not well understood and experiments very difficult to repl9icate (very conventient).”
You have redefined “pathological science” yet again! You and the editor of Sci. Am. seem to add new criteria every time the subject comes up. “Difficult to replicate” was not part of Langmuir’s definition. If it were, that would make electrochemistry, plasma fusion, and the top quark experiment pathological.
Despite the difficulties, cold fusion was recently replicated several hundred times in a row, with automatic equipment, at the NRL. The point was to start and stop it several times with many different samples. It worked every time.
“Okay, then why hasn’t this been commercialized?”
That is obvious from the papers.
“Like I say, I would realy like this to be true. It just has a very strong signature, of pathological science.”
Yet another new criterion! You really should read the book “Polywater” by Felix Franks.
“But Usenet *was* the best source, because it was the most timely, and had the liveliest debate.”
I do not think so. My information circa 1989 came from EPRI, the NSF, the Italian Physical Society and the National Cold Fusion Institute. I think these were better sources. You can read them at LENR-CANR.org and judge for yourself.
“It is also a fact that when cold fusion experiments first came out, there were a bunch of scientists very eager to get in on it, and a lot of them tried . . .”
I have heard this, but they did not publish many papers, so I do not know how many there were or what they did. Most of them went ahead without consulting with electrochemists, which is like trying to build a Tokamak without consulting with a plasma fusion expert.
. . . and a lot failed. There were lots of “here’s thee magic ingredient to make it work” or “here’s the evil spirit you must exorcise before your experiment will work” sorts of claims flying around.”
I suppose you are referring to the fact that electrochemistry takes years to master, and lots of textbooks, and you have to know that cat fur prevents reactions. Yes, they do not hand out PhDs in that subject after a month. I have noted that it takes a terrific amount of skill and knowledge to make a Tokamak reactor, and many other physics experiments, but no one refers to this arcane knowledge as “here’s the evil spirit.”
You inadvertently provided an example of the mistakes that were made in 1989. You mentioned that you have an old bottle of heavy water and you might try the experiment again. An old bottle will not work. Contamination leaches in from the glass, and heavy water is hygroscopic, so it probably has a lot of light water in it. 1% or more will prevent the reaction. An electrochemist would spend a few weeks preparing the heavy water as follows:
Test for light water contamination.
Triple distill, with a complex gadget.
Look for Ralstonia detusculanense and Ralstonia tusculanense, which live in heavy water, astoundingly enough. They are remarkably hard to kill. One is enough to wreck the experiment because they reproduce.
Preparing the cathode is also a lot of work. They do five or ten at a time, and it takes about a year. I am pretty sure you don’t know how to do it, because you do not have a degree in electrochem. as I said, and you cannot know this sort of thing by ESP. If you do not test and prepare the cathode there is no chance the experiment will work. You can learn about how to do it here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEhowtoprodu.pdf
You also have to know how to measure the control parameters, a whole different ball of wax. As far as I know, this was not done in any of the 1989 failed experiments, so they were flying blind.
The people who succeeded in 1989 know all of the above in detail. Lots of detail: enough detail to fill a textbook. I meant that literally. Bockris and others who succeeded have written multi-volume textbooks on electrochemistry. If you try to do a cold fusion experiment without first mastering those textbooks, you will fail. It would be like doing open-heart surgery without first getting a medical degree, or operating the Top Quark experiment without experience in high energy physics.
I do not know what sort of science you do, but I suppose that if an electrochemist were to come along and brag that he could master your field of expertise in a few weeks with something akin to an old untested bottle of heavy water and cat fur (whatever the equivalent would be) you would consider him an arrogant fool. You would say that no one can master a complex professional subject overnight. That is how the electrochemists felt about other people trying to do cold fusion in 1989. That is more or less what Fleischmann and others said in testimony the U.S. Congress and at the NSF meeting. You can read all of that at LENR-CANR.org, or ask any electrochemist. I have asked hundreds of them. The hundreds who, in fact, replicated this experiment.
December 3, 2009, 10:16 amJed Rothwell says:
I wrote:
“I am pretty sure Martin Fleischmann knows more about electrochemical calorimetry than you do.”
See for yourself:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesMisoperibol.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesMprecisiona.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf
Always, always, see for yourself. Never take my word for anything, or anyone’s word for anything. READ ORIGINAL SOURCES. That’s my mantra.
December 3, 2009, 10:30 amHarryEagar says:
I guess counterstrike is not going to back up his phony claims about ‘hired nuisance-kooks’
December 3, 2009, 1:01 pmJed Rothwell says:
David Schwartz says:
“Jed Rothwell: You continue to prove me right. CRU said the same thing, “All the data is out there, so we don’t have to provide a way to reproduce results that prove our claims. . . .”
I know nothing about CRU, but in the case of cold fusion, all of the data is out there, and the researchers obviously have provided a way to reproduce results, since the results have been independently reproduced thousands of times in hundreds of different labs.
December 3, 2009, 1:24 pmJed Rothwell says:
John Moore says:
“in the very early days the performance of a transistor was apt to change if someone
slammed a door.
This is classic of pathological science.”
Yet ANOTHER new criterion! Langmuir must be spinning in his grave. So, you are saying that transistors were pathological? Amazing.
“There is a big problem with that: the transistor was based on known physics. the theory preceded the experiment. Cold fusion does not have that characteristic. It is a mish-mash of claims — this guy gets excess heat; that guy gets reaction products; etc, etc.”
All science starts as a mish-mash. Note that Prof. Mish cannot held responsible for the findings of Dr. Mash or Herr Doctor Professor Cat-fur.
But your point is that a subject is only pathological when there is no theory. Okay. Cold fusion resembles high temperature superconductivity, radioactivity, fusion in the sun, and cellular reproduction. It was discovered before it could be explained by theory. You are suggesting that all of these subjects were pathological because no one understood them at first.
People have observed cellular reproduction — babies, that is — for millions of years. There was never any question babies are real. Needless to say no one can control reproduction even now; making babies is more problematic than manufacturing transistors. You cannot prevent genetic disease, or a thankless child sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Babies could not be explained before the discovery of DNA in 1952. So anyone who believed babies are real was pathological? Anyone who believes today that calorimeters can measure 100 W, and that x-ray film, tritium detectors and mass spectrometers work and therefore cold fusion is real is . . . pathological. Right?
Millions of other phenomena were well-established before they were understood by theory, and many today still cannot be explained. For example, theorists tell me there is no agreement about what governs the half-lives of different unstable elements. Yet no one doubts that some elements decay faster than others. Except you: no doubt you say this is pathological.
Frankly, you do not have what I would call a scientific outlook. You seem adverse to the notion that we should discover things and then explain them. You label everything not already in the textbooks “pathological” and then you ridicule experts who study these things as “true believers” who “do not have a clue” what role cat hair might play in electrochemistry. What’s with the ridicule? Why do you feel it is okay to poke fun at distinguished experts just because you know nothing about their specialty? Who Do You Think You Are?
And what is with this notion that we should not study things that we do not yet understand? That because the mechanism has not yet been discovered, the research is pathological — as the editor of Sci. Am. put it. As Robert Duncan said on 60 Minutes: “But to say, because we don’t fundamentally understand the process and that’s why we’re not going to study it, is like saying, ‘I’m too sick to go to the doctor.’”
December 3, 2009, 2:12 pmJohn Moore says:
Jed… It is clear that you are much farther into this cold fusion stuff than I am. I was deep into it at the start, and my information was from good sources (such as papers, and that newsgroup). Since then, it has not been.
I thank you for bringing this up, for a couple of reasons. One, it has given me the experience of being on the “consensus” side of a controversy, right at the time where that position is being challenged on AGW. The other is because it is interesting to see what is still happening.
Not having the time to dig deeply, I’ll say that I remain highly skeptical. That is reinforced (unlike the position of the warmists) by the very solid theory of Quantum Physics, but that is not sufficient to prove CF wrong.
However, I hope that you are right, and that this is a real phenomenon that can be useful.
Finally, one response re my bottle of D2O. I was not planning any more experiments. It’s just sort of a souvenir. I have no idea whether the D to H ratio in it has changed. As for the trace contaminants, we all know from the Polywater experiment (with which we have each beat the other over the head) that in some experiments, minute trace contaminants are significant (in Polywater, they turned out to be the real cause of the effect).
December 3, 2009, 2:17 pmJed Rothwell says:
John Moore says:
“Finally, one response re my bottle of D2O. I was not planning any more experiments. It’s just sort of a souvenir. I have no idea whether the D to H ratio in it has changed. . . .”
I realize that. I was just illustrating the need for arcane knowledge. You probably know that heavy water is hygroscopic, so you would check for this, if you could. You probably would have guessed the stuff needs to be cleaned up. Ah, but did you know it often has bacteria growing in it?!
By the way, that is an elegant demonstration of evolution, since pure heavy water did not exist on earth before 1940, and it is toxic to most forms of life.
“As for the trace contaminants, we all know from the Polywater experiment (with which we have each beat the other over the head) that in some experiments, minute trace contaminants are significant (in Polywater, they turned out to be the real cause of the effect).”
Good point. Trace amounts of some elements enhance the cold fusion reaction, mainly by enhancing loading and other electrochemical parameters. Trace amounts of other elements, such as carbon, poison the reaction, again for conventional chemical reasons. (I should explain that I have no idea what causes the nuclear reaction, but I do know what electrochemical conditions must be met before the nuclear reaction turns on. This is analogous to knowing that all of the chemical explosive charges in an implosion fission bomb have to go off within a millisecond, without having any idea why that, in turn, causes a nuclear explosion.)
Regarding polywater, I wrote a review of the Franks book, comparing and contrasting polywater with cold fusion. Polywater is a fascinating subject. It is a lot more nuanced than people realize. It is beyond the scope of the discussion. If you are interested in reading my analysis contact my be e-mail. My address is on the front page at LENR-CANR.org.
December 3, 2009, 3:06 pmClark Baker says:
One more thing – while Al Gore’s global warming disciples have applied questionable computer models to the last 150 years of weather, Ian Plimer PhD has looked at the past 4 billion years of the Earth’s climate. Unless you read his book and it’s ~2200 scientific footnotes, you won’t know how preposterous the global warming scam is.
December 3, 2009, 4:13 pmJed Rothwell says:
David Schwartz says:
“Jed: Unfortunately, scientists tend to be ill-equipped to deal with deliberate deception. The incident with Robert Duncan was a very sad one. He took their word that they were measuring what they claimed they were measuring . . .”
He did not! That’s ridiculous. He knows how calorimeters work for crying out loud. Even I can tell by looking what is hooked up where.
“Many chemical reactions will do the same thing. (Throw a match at a house and you may get a lot more heat out than you put in.)”
Okay, show me a match that burns for an hour, or for 3 months. Duncan and I have both observed cold fusion reactions that continued far longer than any chemical reaction. Cold fusion cathodes are, in fact, the size of a match, but they sometimes produce more energy than you would get if you burned every object in the room, or a kilogram of gasoline.
“And you can measure the heat out and the heat in as expertly as you want to ‘verify’ my results.”
If you think you could fool Duncan (or me, for that matter) you have no clue how these things work. A chemical device the size of a cold fusion cell would stop producing heat after a few minutes. The fuel would be consumed.
“Had he suddenly (and unknown to the researchers in advance) produced a helium detector and asked to add that to their apparatus . . .”
This is a preposterous assertion. Have you ever seen a helium detector? Do you have any idea how they work? The ones in labs at the ENEA are the size of a desk, and I have never seen one smaller than a suitcase. You cannot just whip one out and connect it to an experiment while no one notices. You have to design the experiment from the ground up to accommodate it. Many researchers have done this, and they have detected helium in the same ratio to the heat as plasma fusion produces, but it takes months or years to determine this. You have to do it dozens of times, and it is best to send the samples out to other expert labs to confirm the results in blind tests, the way Miles did.
“(At least, this is my best analysis of what seems to have happened based on reports from secondary sources.)”
Well as it happens I am a primary source. I spent a couple of days with Duncan discussing this plus various off-the-wall topics, especially while his wife gave us a high speed walking tour of Rome con il vino. I know how those calorimeters work. And I assure you, these reports are b-u-n-k, bunk, and your analysis is wrong.
Again and again let me suggest that you READ ORIGINAL SOURCES, and learn how helium is measured (for example). Do this and you will know this sort of thing without me telling you. Put aside your ‘secondary source’ Ouija-board based rumor mill notions, and look at the ENEA detector:
http://lenr-canr.org/Experiments.htm#PhotosENEAFrascati
Does that look like something Elisabeth Shou could hide in her bra, whip out, and attach to an experiment when no one was looking? (See the cold fusion fantasy movie “The Saint” in which Ms. Shou secreted theory equations from Peter Hagelstein’s papers in her bra, which amused Prof. Hagelstein to no end.)
December 3, 2009, 6:00 pmJed Rothwell says:
Getting back to this “deception” assertion by David Schwartz:
“Unfortunately, scientists tend to be ill-equipped to deal with deliberate deception. The incident with Robert Duncan was a very sad one. . . .”
Putting aside the fact that Duncan could tell a fake calorimeter in about two seconds . . . Think about this “deliberate deception” fantasy for a moment and you will see that it makes no sense. It is like the 9/11 conspiracy theories: a sane motive is lacking. Let’s spell out your hypothesis –
Take a group of roughly 2,000 mainstream, distinguished scientists, many of them at the peak of their careers. People in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, the President of the Electrochemical Soc., people with dozens of awards and medals and textbooks to their names. People like Schwinger who have laws of physics named after them. They are “painfully conventional people” as Martin Fleischmann says.
Now, what you are saying is that starting in March 1989, this group of scientists suddenly went bonkers. For no reason, with no conceivable advantage, they transmogrified from pillars of the scientific community to frauds, who go around “deliberately deceiving” people like Duncan on CBS television. Year after year, they publish papers knowing full well that by doing so they will be faced with a firestorm of criticism, accusations in the Washington Post that they are lunatics and criminals, and their grant money would be cut. In some cases these attacks have destroyed their marriages, livelihoods and careers.
Okay, why? What is the motivation? What do they get out of it? Most of these people work for government agencies or the military. Like the federal researchers who invented the Internet, they will never earn one dime from this discovery, so money is not the motivation.
What is your theory? Do you suppose they are masochists or reality show wannabes who go around destroying their private lives for the thrill of deceiving people on television?
This notion that any cold fusion researcher is deceiving people or that there would any benefit to doing so, is preposterous. They do not have the means or motivation. On the contrary, they have every reason to hide their results — as some have done.
I know them well. I have worked with them, and spent days and weeks in their labs and homes. I will tell you the one and only reason any of them perseveres and why they still publish and still work, some of them long after they retired and their salary was cut off, all of them at great personal sacrifice:
They do this because they are scientists. Right down to their fingertips. Because, as Martin Fleischmann says, when you find something important you keep doing it. Because, as my late friend Eugene Mallove put it, they are driven to “heed the eternal challenge of science not to follow where the worn path may lead, but to go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.”
And also because they are the stubbornest people on earth, and a pain in the butt to work with.
December 3, 2009, 6:46 pmCW Baker says:
*** for some reason I could not post my links on Volokh. I’ve reposed my comments with the links on my blog***
For those who raised the issue of HIV, AIDS and Peter Duesberg:
When James Murtagh MD alleged in June 2008 that Peter Duesberg was guilty of genocide in South Africa, I was asked to investigate the allegations.
When I opened the case, Murtagh immediately pressured me to abandon the investigation. Murtagh, John Moore PhD (Cornell), Brian Foley PhD (LANL) and others continued the pressure until one of their cohorts committed an ID theft against me (LAPD Report #08-0619018). Murtagh is currently avoiding process service in this related libel case and, according to his own admissions, is being funded by these pharmaceutically-funded South African activist groups.
In the following months, I discovered that while the NIH, CDC and other recipients of AIDS funding estimate millions of HIV and AIDS deaths in the US and abroad, the AMA reports the infectious disease – including HIV and AIDS – has been statistically insignificant since the 1960s. These mortality numbers are as low in Australia and South Africa.
This week, HIV discoverer Luc Montagnier MD (Nobel 2008) has finally admitted that HIV can be quickly and easily cured without drugs, but that the drug industry can’t profit from clean water or nutritious food. In his statement, Montagnier even challenges NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.
What are AIDS patients dying from? The AMA reports that more than two million Americans die each year from adverse drug reactions (ADRs), which corroborates why allegedly HIV+ patients like Martin Delany, Hank Wilson, Ferd Eggan, Joyce Hafford, Belynda Dunn, Joe Carroccio, George Sanderson and Howard Jacobs have all died from the medication (e.g. liver cancer).
As a career criminal investigator who has independently looked at both HIV and Global Warming, the motives and template used to fake evidence, create hysteria and attack skeptical scientists at CRU is identical to the one used by Robert Gallo and Fauci to enrich themselves in the AIDS scam. Like Montagnier, both are interviewed in Brent Leung’s documentary, which continues to receive critical acclaim in film festivals around the world by everyone except the of AIDS research and pharmaceutical funding.
Because infectious disease has been statistically insignificant since the 1960s, it’s now understandable why the NIH and CDC promote hysteria (H1N1) that keeps alive their combined $14 billion annual funding. Without infectious disease, there’s no reason for either agency to receive more than a fraction of their current funding.
In South Africa, HIV morality is exaggerated because without the hysteria, the 1600+ international mining companies that sack Africa’s mineral wealth at ~$100/mo per miner (as opposed to ~$12,000/mo per US and European miner) could no longer blame HIV and AIDS for their mine-related lung diseases – lawsuits which threaten the collapse of the mining industry and the South African government.
So like Global Warming, the stakes are VERY high. The cure of AIDS would have a catastrophic effect upon the world economy.
December 3, 2009, 9:02 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Jed Rothwell: Again the same bizarre combination of “it’s super-dramatic, you can’t miss it” and “I can’t show it to you, but it’s in thousands of papers”. If you have some device the size of a match that can produce more energy than burning down a room, mail it to me and explain to me how to activate it. I’ll gladly verify your claims. If I get, say, twice as much energy out of it than a comparable mass of, say, black powder or comparable LiPO battery, I’ll include a note that cold fusion really works and that I am thrilled to have been proven wrong in as many of my blog posts, USENET posts, emails, private discussions, and professional communications as I possibly can get away with for the next two years or more.
December 3, 2009, 10:48 pmWilliam Manning says:
Wonderful discussion.
Some have tried to argue that denying global warming is as fallacious as denying the viral cause of AIDS.
However, I would argue that this analogy fails.
The leading proponent of the multi-factoral theory of AIDS (chemical toxicity/nutritional deficiency) was made by Dr. Peter Duesberg, a tenured Professor of Molecular Biology at UC Berkeley.
His work has been extensively published in the peer-reviewed literature, including the journals Cancer Research, Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
One is certainly free to dispute Duesberg’s interpretation of the data, but, nonetheless, the man is eminently qualified and has passed peer-review.
One could argue that it is equally unscientific to silence critics of both orthodox paradigms of global warming and AIDS
December 4, 2009, 12:07 amzuch says:
Wow. An HIV/AIDS denier pipes up, saying the poor HIV/AIDS deniers are being unjustly suppressed, just like the AGW deniers:
Yep. We really don’t know nothing and nobody can be trusted. And science is rotten to the core.
Say, you know, I’ve got this neat little gizmo in my garage, attach to my car’s fuel injectors, hook up some plain ol’ H2O, and I get 300 MPG, and the sweetest smelling exhaust on the Bay Bridge. Anyone wanna buy one?
Cheers,
December 4, 2009, 7:11 amJed Rothwell says:
David Schwartz says:
“Jed Rothwell: Again the same bizarre combination of ‘it’s super-dramatic, you can’t miss it’ and ‘I can’t show it to you, but it’s in thousands of papers’.”
I have showed them to you! I have uploaded many photos of the devices. They were shown on CBS 60 Minutes. I have been to many labs to look at them, and they have been shown in operation at conferences. You can go to labs too, if you have skills and information the people in the labs can use. (In my case, because I translate and edit papers.)
It is not super-dramatic, by the way. It is like watching paint dry.
“If you have some device the size of a match that can produce more energy than burning down a room, mail it to me and explain to me how to activate it.”
I have explained how to activate it. Read the papers I uploaded. You can learn how to do this in 2 or 3 years if you already have an undergraduate degree. I know several people in the U.S. and Japan who got PhDs learning how to do cold fusion experiments.
At present the cathodes are only made by hand at places like the Italian ENEA labs and the NRL in Washington, DC, and by Japanese and Chinese corporations, at tremendous labor cost. So I cannot mail you one. You have to sign a joint research agreement with these places. Then they supply the materials for free. The equipment used to test them costs anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to 4 billion dollars (for the Japanese National Synchrotron beam) and it is not portable, as you see from the photos. You have to have many nifty 3-letter gadgets: SEM, STM, QMS and so on, and power supplies, pumps, glove boxes, hydrogen purifiers, Mili-Q purifiers, computers, more computers, flowmeters, coolers, warmers, more computers, and so on and so forth.
“I’ll gladly verify your claims.”
Unless you know a great deal about chemistry and physics I do not think you are capable of doing this. I certainly am not, and I probably know more about it than you do. Granted, it is easier than operating a Tokamak reactor, a fission power reactor, or a Boeing 747.
By the way, do you assert that Tokamaks, nukes and airplanes do not exist, because I cannot mail you one, and you could not operate one? Have you, personally, ever seen the inside of a nuclear power plant? If you haven’t I assume you claim they do not exist.
“If I get, say, twice as much energy out of it than a comparable mass of, say, black powder or comparable LiPO battery, I’ll include a note that cold fusion really works . . .”
People have gotten 10,000 to 100,000 times more energy out of these devices than any battery or chemical device could produce. The upper limit has not been reached, because it would take years or centuries to exhaust the fuel.
December 4, 2009, 9:58 amDavid Schwartz says:
Jed Rothwell: Hey, this is amazing. You have now made a 100% factually true claim. Congratulations.
I’m getting flashbacks to Tilley, who claimed (correctly) that he could make a car that could go hundreds of miles on a 9 volt battery, the same voltage as a common radio battery.
Literally true, but grossly misleading:
You can design a muon-catalyzed cold fusion system such that some parts of the system (the fusion cell) do have a lot more energy going out of them than going into them. The problem is that most of the energy has to go in in the form of muons, which we know of no efficient way to produce, and lots of the energy comes out as pions (Or is it muons stuck to alpha partices? I can’t remember) which we know no efficient way to harvest.
But it’s fusion at room temperature, and if you draw the lines right, you will have a box with lots more energy going out than coming in.
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if you had an object the size of a match that had a total net energy excess equivalent to burning down a room.
Now, all we need is an efficient way to produce muons, an efficient way to separate alpha particles from muons, and an efficient way to harvest the energy from the emitted alpha particles. (I think there are actually a few more things we’d need for this to be practical, you can find details on the wikipedia page.)
Sound promising? Not to me.
Tilley was trying to bilk investors. What about you?
(I will try as hard as I can to stop this threadjacking and not reply any more. I think I’ve made every point there is about how cold fusion is simply not promising as an energy source.)
December 4, 2009, 12:17 pmJed Rothwell says:
David Schwartz says:
“You can design a muon-catalyzed cold fusion system such that some parts of the system (the fusion cell) do have a lot more energy going out of them than going into them.”
Cold fusion is not a bit like muon-catalyzed fusion, or plasma fusion. They require input energy, whereas cold fusion can occur in a fully-ignited, self-sustaining reaction with no input. Plasma fusion produces a deadly flux of neutrons, whereas cold fusion does not, for reasons still unknown.
“Tilley was trying to bilk investors. What about you?”
The research is being conducted mainly at the Italian, Japanese, Chinese and U.S. governments at national and military labs, not by investors. I have no financial investment in China Lake or the ENEA National Labs, and no influence over what they do.
“(I will try as hard as I can to stop this threadjacking and not reply any more. I think I’ve made every point there is about how cold fusion is simply not promising as an energy source.)”
I do not think you have made any points relevant to cold fusion, but in any case I have uploaded documents by many experts at places like the Navy and the Defense Intelligence Agency who disagree with you. These people know much more about cold fusion than you do.
December 4, 2009, 1:11 pmCW Baker says:
Okay ZUCH – I accept that neither of us are scientists IF you’ll admit that 30 years and thousands of investigations with the LAPD and as a licensed investigator qualifies me as an expert in the recognition of human behavior and criminal misconduct. As such, I’m also accustomed to being attacked for presenting politically offensive evidence.
That said, can you explain why the man who started it all, HIV discoverer Luc Montagnier MD (Nobel 2008) , agrees with me? And while you’re at it, explain why taxpayers spend ~$14 billion/year to pay people like NIAID Director Anthony Fauci MD (who Montagnier implicates by name) to protect Americans from infectious diseases that the AMA reports has been statistically irrelevant since the 1960s.
December 4, 2009, 4:13 pmCW Baker says:
William Manning – good point. Unlike the four reports published by the journal Science without peer review, Duesberg’s heavily reference 1988 PNAS report has never been challenged, despite the open invitation for Gallo and the rest to answer. Instead, they blogged their attacks on the Orwellian South African blog they call AIDS Truth. Unsurprisingly, their blog doesn’t even have a comment section, which makes it something less than even a blog.
Nevertheless, the NIH uses it as a reference – although they add a disclaimer next to their reference. If you don’t believe me, ask the NIH how, when, where and who proved that HIV 1) exists, 2) attacks cells and 3) causes AIDS. They’ll say they BELIEVE (theology) it’s true but the reports they link to only ASSUME it while citing other reports that, when found, also ASSUME. They then link to the South African blog.
What fascinates me as a criminal investigator are the attacks I routinely log by a tiny core of ~12 “truthers” who methodically attack and destroy the careers of those who raise embarrassing questions. The documentary House of Numbers, currently on the film festival circuit, shows this group in the wild.
December 4, 2009, 6:55 pmJohn Moore says:
CW Baker… with all due respect, you are a medically ignorant.
There is no doubt that HIV causes AIDS, and that AIDS kills lots and lots of people. It is also true that, surprise, drug manufacturers prefer to sell drugs, not distribute clean water (your link). So what?
It is also true that the HIV epidemic has been exaggerated by groups for their own purposes (gays in the US back in the late 80s and 90s, various groups in Africa).
Nevertheless, HIV causes AIDS. HIV is infectious. Genetic sequencing of AIDS RNA has been used to trace the trajectory of this virus from person to person. It is (last I knew) the most rapidly mutating virus ever encountered.
The understanding has advanced a long ways since the thoroughly discredited Duesberg published the paper you link, and the research has shown all sorts of *details* about how HIV infections operate, how HIV causes not only AIDS but HIV encephalitis, and all sorts of other things. This is a *large* body of science, much more susceptible to experimentation and falsification than the AGW hypothesis or the paleoclimatic record.
Duesberg presents an interesting example for this ClimateGate dispute. He was a respected retrovirologist who got it wrong on AIDS, and like many people, rather than admitting (or probably recognizing) his error, he went farther and farther afield – he painted himself into a corner, and has been there ever since.
December 4, 2009, 8:30 pmJed Rothwell says:
CW Baker says:
“Okay ZUCH – I accept that neither of us are scientists IF you’ll admit that 30 years and thousands of investigations with the LAPD and as a licensed investigator qualifies me as an expert in the recognition of human behavior and criminal misconduct.”
You appear to the proverbial man who has only a hammer and sees all problems as a nail.
In 1992, a 12 kg meteor struck a Chevy Malibu belonging to Michelle Knapp, destroying the trunk. She found the meteor in a crater in the concrete under the car. When she reported the damage, the local police asked her repeatedly if she had an angry boyfriend or someone else who might want to damage her car with the stone. Needless to say, the damage far exceeded anything that an angry boyfriend could do with a stone at ground level. He would have to drop it out of a high-flying airplane, or shoot it from a cannon. However, police do not know much physics, and they are inclined to assume that anything that happens is done on purpose and must be someone’s fault. You seem to suffer from a similar mindset.
AIDS is caused by the HIV virus. That is a fact, not a conspiracy, and not something that can judged by the techniques used in criminal investigations.
December 4, 2009, 8:54 pmCW Baker says:
John Moore… Since you BELIEVE (e.g. faith, theology) that HIV causes AIDS, it should be easy for you to find a link that shows exactly 1) when, 2) where, 3) how and 4) who proved that HIV a) exists, b) attacks cells and c) causes AIDS. Please post it.
Also, can you post what blog Duesberg’s National Academy of Sciences report was discredited? Since (as you say) EVERYONE knows HIV causes AIDS (except me and the Italians), presenting your proof should be easy.
As a ctiminal investigator, I’m as interested in evidence as any REAL scientist. Since you produced neither, I can only assume that you’re scientifically incompetent. Don’t show me your PhD, John – I want to see your proof.
Looking forward to a reply WITH evidence.
December 4, 2009, 9:50 pmDavid Schwartz says:
CW Baker: If you believe the scientific theory of evolution, can you please find me a link that shows exactly when, where, and how it was proved that random inheritable mutations combined with selective survival caused all the speciation seen on Earth? You seem to have a serious misunderstanding about how science works.
December 4, 2009, 10:17 pmJohn Moore says:
I don’t “believe” it – I know it. I know it from reading innumerable articles and a few papers over the years. I’, not going to show you my proof. I would have to go back and dig up a bunch of stuff, and frankly, it’s not worth doing that for a crank who isn’t going to believe it anyway. So you can no go on believing that nobody can actually show you proof, and I can go on about more interesting discussoins.
December 5, 2009, 12:27 amTerry Ott says:
Because I profess no scientific credentials, nor a definite position on this AGW stuff, and will not take the time to get “into it” in the sense of trying to understand the fine points … I may be somewhat typical of Joe Sixpack here.
I am grateful this is coming to a head, and thank whomever did the hacking/whistleblowing to get the subject to a place where there would be some open forum (rather than behind the curtain) scrutiny. We now move to a different playing field. The court of public awareness and opinion has now convened.
I hope we’ll now have a chance to see how key people on whatever side have behaved, what they’ve said and WILL say when questioned about their tactics and motivations and affiliations and biases (if they have any). Why they made certain decisions and did and said certain things.
Our “virtual jury” doesn’t have to understand climate science very well, if at all; no more, certainly, than members of a “real jury” needed corporate finance expertise in the Enron case. What we do need, and most of us have it, is the ability to observe things like: “they said this, but they did that — why?” and “if they were acting according to principles of “good scientific method”, why/how would/could this/that have happened?” And “one of these folks is lying, so whom am I going to believe, and why?” And, “the law says this is supposed to have been done — was it?”
No matter what the outcome of this dust up, a “good thing” we can expect as a result is that more citizens will become aware of how enormously the outcome can/would impact our economy, our lifestyles, and potentially our careers and livelihoods.
Even if, or maybe “especially if” this smoldering thing gets swept under the rug prematurely and in a cavalier manner, THAT tells us something, too, does it not? It will make me VERY suspicious if that happens. Fortunately, the internet gives us the tool to be aware of that happening.
December 5, 2009, 11:49 amCW Baker says:
Moore & Schwartz — Maybe you forgot, but most children learn by the 8th grade that Occam’s Razor does not require anyone to prove the negative. If 8th graders know that, real scientists should too.
While Occam’s Razor does not require ANYONE to prove that animals did NOT evolve, or that the earth is NOT round, a quick Google search will locate proof that animals evolve and that the earth is round. Google is less successful at producing easily verifiable proof that humanity’s little footprint influences our weather more than solar flares, super novae and undersea super volcanoes. While the CRU and HIV scientists have worked hard to fabricate and suppress scientific evidence and attack credible skeptics like Ian Plimer, they’ve failed to explain why the oceans are cooling or why the discoverer of HIV now admits that HIV can be easily overcome without drugs but that the drug industry can’t profit from healthy food or clean water.
Just as Pope Urban’s astronomers wasted millions of hours defending Rome’s theocratic consensus of their geocentric universe, the Grand Wizards of HIV and Global Warming have wasted millions of hours defending their trillion dollar belief that HIV and CO2 are existential threats to Humanity.
Anyone who has known an alleged HIV+ patient or has grown tomatoes understands Occam’s axiom that “The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.”
As the recipients of pharmaceutical funding hold up their PhDs and MDs the same way that Pope Urban used his cross to defend his geocentric astronomers from scientific quacks like Galileo, Occam’s Razor and the hackers who disclosed the CRU’s private emails remind us that scientific PROOF is often more reliable than scientific FAITH. While real scientists are required to prove their theories, theologians and their disciples are only required to have FAITH in their BELIEFS. While I appreciate faith (I believe in God), it has no business in science.
While Moore and Schwartz argue theology, I posted more about the fake HIV numbers yesterday. Thoughtful people can decide for themselves.
December 5, 2009, 1:18 pmJohn Moore says:
Unfortunately, this is only part of the picture. It also helps to know the relative weights of various parts of controversies. Examples: how important is a short term trend (last 10 years of no warming in surf temps); how to weigh atmospheric temperatures vs ocean energy measurements; how to evaluate models that attempt to forecast future warming; what is the definition of a global temperature.
December 5, 2009, 3:23 pmJohn Moore says:
Okay, this one is simple enough to maybe explain to you. You assert:
You grossly misinterpret what was said there. It is very well known that most HIV infections don’t “take” – that the immune system affects how susceptible one is to it (this is true of any infectious disease).
You make the enormous leap to the conclusion that therefore drugs aren’t needed.
The fallacy of you logic is that, while reducing factors which harm the immune system may increase HIV resistance, it is not a perfect effect. You can have an outstanding immune syste, catch HIV and subsequently die of AIDS. Nowhere does the discoverer of aids “admit” that drugs are not needed or that HIV can be easily overcome – in the very cite you mention.
You are reading into that quote what you already believe, not what is being said.
December 5, 2009, 3:28 pmCW Baker says:
Terry – You make a good point about what criminal investigators call consciousness of guilt.
There’s no mystery in this, nor does one require a college degree to understand. Simply stated, the innocent generally don’t cover up their actions nor do they attack those who ask questions or introduce evidence.
The guilty behave much differently. For example, while those who kill in self-defense usually report the crime immediately, a murderer will often attempt to conceal his crime by disturbing evidence or disposing his weapon, bloody clothing or the body or by cleaning the crime scene.
While the innocent will simply call the police to investigate, the guilty will often say nothing or provide a more tedious story, often riddled with holes and defended with a patchwork of implausible stories that, when checked out and exposed as false, are covered by additional and more implausible stories.
Larger criminal organizations will have enough money to pay cohorts and other beneficiaries to corroborate the stories. This is why the recipients of pharmaceutical or global warming funding from Cornell will defend and corroborate other recipients of funding at Harvard or Los Alamos – and vice-versa.
December 5, 2009, 5:23 pmCW Baker says:
If CRU, Cornell, Harvard or the Los Alamos National Laboratory had nothing to hide, they would simply hire the police or licensed investigators (uncorrupted by money or politics) to collect and examine the evidence and expose the culprits. Instead, people like Robert Gallo hire unqualified dupes to cover up, explain and rationalize their scientific misconduct. Such dupes are routinely compensated.
One does not require a doctorate to recognize criminal behavior for what it is.
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