Guest post by Dr. Patrick Michaels
Three items appeared last week that make me wonder if The Onion is surreptitiously acquiring science journals and trade publications. Here’s what one, “ScienceNordic” says it does on its home page:
Our team of experienced science reporters and editors follow the regional scientific communities closely, and report constantly and relentlessly on the latest and greatest discoveries.
NEWS FLASH #1: According to ScienceNordic, global obesity is caused by eating too much. Eating too much is caused by increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Surely one of the “latest and greatest discoveries” of our time! To wit: a Danish researcher, Lars-Georg Hersoug and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen put six—count em’—six volunteers into rooms either with ambient carbon dioxide or elevated concentrations. After seven hours, they could eat whatever they wanted. Those who breathed higher CO2 ate six percent more. Call ScienceNordic!!
Yeah. This is what masquerades as environmental science these days. Allowing for an equal number of controls means that only three individuals were in each group. There is simply no way that these results have any statistical validity, but, hey, we’re talking about carbon dioxide, the death gas. Forget suing McDonald’s for obesity, Exxon-Mobil has a lot more dough!
Furthering my hypotheses about The Onion, you have to wonder if it has bought Geophysical Research Letters from the American Geophysical Union.
NEWS FLASH #2: Models that don’t work provide “useful estimates” for engineers.
Huh? But, indeed, a recent edition of GRL contains a paper by Francina Dominguez of the University of Arizona (with three co-authors) on changes in winter precipitation for the western U.S. predicted by regional climate models. They compared the observed average and historical 50-year record daily rainfall to values simulated by eight climate models. Gaze and weep:
Area-averaged mean (left) and 50-year maximum expected daily rainfall (right) for four western regions plus the entire area (“all”). The black marks are the models and the red dots are reality. This is what climate model failure looks like.
Damn the data! Full speed ahead!! Despite the fact that the models don’t work, they go on to generate estimates of the differences in daily and extreme precipitation projected for the middle of this century compared to the recent past. This is not “useful” information. It is bad information.
NEWS FLASH #3: A great idea: “1984” in 2084.
People were horrified that the socialist dystopia in George Orwell’s 1984 employed sophisticated “science” for behavioral modification and social integration. S. Matthew Liao of New York University and two colleagues think such things in fact should be considered because global warming is so horrible.
They write in the journal Ethics, Policy and Environment, “our central aim here is to show that human engineering deserves consideration alongside other solutions in the debate about how to solve the problem of climate change”, they then propose some examples that they think are feasible, including
•a pill or a patch that would induce nausea when people eat meat
•embryo selection or hormonal modification to make people smaller
•drugs to enhance empathy and altruism, because “higher empathy levels correlate with stronger environmental behaviors”
•a fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family to limit the number of children
In an interview in The Atlantic, Liao vociferously asserted that he does not think that these changes should be mandated, rather he says they should be “modifications borne of individual choices”. In his paper he is a bit more specific:
As we envisage it, human engineering would be a voluntary activity – possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored health care – rather than a coerced, mandatory activity. [second italics added]
Excuse me, but charging people higher taxes for not taking a pill that makes them sick, for not aborting embryos that may become tall children, for not taking drugs to care about global warming, and for not limiting progeny is nothing but coercive.
Astoundingly, Mr. Liao argues that the nausea pill enhances liberty because people who want a steak will make decisions based upon that desire, rather than “truly deciding” to be coerced by a state-incentivized drug. In Mr. Liao’s world, like George Orwell’s, freedom is slavery.
Count me out on this one. Hopefully, The Onion or whoever will stop publishing papers providing “useful estimates” for engineers based on models that do not work. And while we are at it, we could actually take a little responsibility for our weight, instead of blaming Exxon-Mobil.
Patrick Michaels is the former state climatologist for the State of Virginia, and is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute.
We are watching you ……………………….
Wierd science! Anyone who has ever served on submarines should be easily identified. /sarc
Onion will often make you cry….now we know that Geophysical Research Letters and Chairman Liao can also bring a tear to your eye….we can only hope that the ‘transparency’ of this stupidity….is finally becoming ‘visible’ to humanity…..
many thanks to PM & AW !
Voluntary? OK you be the short tree hugging vegetarian with no kids and I’ll choose just to be…normal!
Uhmmm….you ARE aware The Onion is a joke, right?
What? You do know the Onion is comedy, and they are making fun of global warmers here, right?
•drugs to enhance empathy and altruism, because “higher empathy levels correlate with stronger environmental behaviors”
Hmmm, when I read this, I thought of the movie “Serenity” which is a really good yarn. Interestingly enough the government in the movie thought that people needed more sympathy and altruism as well. It didn’t turn out to well for the people though. Of course I’m sure the U.N. can do better…
This makes me want to weep.
Liao missed a trick. If humans were genetically engineered to be cold-blooded rather than warm-blooded, we would not need heating or aircon, and would need less food to keep our temperatures constant.
I for one welcome our new reptilian descendants….
Luckily we are many, and they are few…
This is too strange to be real. Which is exactly how I felt when I first saw the Joy Behar show. Alas….?
Good grief…… These people are truly dangerous. But the most worrying part is that these people and their bizarre thinking is but a symptom of a broken and dysfunctional system where excellence is condemned and conformity is rewarded…. In the nineties, just in my limited slice of the world, I watched people pouring into the “environmental sciences”… almost all of them were environmental activists…. They weren’t going into higher learning to do science, they were going in to form a cadre of environmental fighters armed with the legal and social advantage of possessing a “degree”…. But not only that, they have over the last couple of decades so distorted the language, let alone the science, that when sceptical scientists form a group and use the word “Environmental in their title, they are subject to an inquisition by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Media Watch program for somehow being “misleading”… Apparently only a certain “class” of people are allowed to use the word “environmental” in their name.
I think it was George Orwell who said…. “Control the language, control the thought.”
Time we stopped giving our hard earned taxes to these people….. They are destroying our society and freedom and we are paying them to do it.
The rising CO2 concentration nicely correlates with the rising global life expectancy trend — therefore the more CO2 the longer we live: QED.
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/images2/Maddison_life_exp.gif
The high quality of WUWT posts lately makes me think it is becoming the Onion of global warming sites.
That liao is a real pill. I’m guessing he has a lot at steak. A smaller man… wait. I’m guessing it had something to do with his environment, but I can’t empathise with it.
Links to the papers would help people understand that this post is referring to real publications and not to parodies published in the Onion, even though the Onion might refuse to publish them or report on them because they are too ridiculous to even be considered parody. It might also be fun to ask the Onion to comment on this post.
@ur momisugly Killsmith and tigerwoodsleg : Work on your reading comprehension guys.
It is pretty clear that the writer knows exactly what the Onion does. Furthermore the cited articles were not in the Onion indeed the author told us exactly where they were published. The authors point is that although the articles were published published in supposedly serious places they looked like they belonged in the Onion.
I see the potential for a bit of fun here. While Liao is breeding smaller and smaller humanoids, I think I’ll breed larger and larger Maine Coon cats. Anyone like to open a book?
So, Patrick, what you trying to say is that those papers were not from Onion, but were, in fact, peer-reviewed papers, published in science journals?
Ouch.
@ur momisugly Phil & Ian H : I was happier thinking they might be from the onion, but deep down, I knew that “you can’t make this stuff up”
We really need a good World War…..
If these were not in the Onion, they should have been. That much is true. Isn’t it also true that if the “science” was done so poorly as to be a parody of science it also does not deserve a post on this site?
In other news, Broncos search for a team that does not need a quarterback: http://www.theonion.com/articles/broncos-calling-teams-to-see-if-they-need-anyone-w,27673/
What is worse? A parody of good science or someone who purports to be a good scientist wasting time analyzing same?
Chairman Liao can take his cultural revolution and insert it in the fundementally correct place where he can examine the experience with objective concentration while being asked: “Do you feel this new research project has impacted you coercively in any way? Do you feel your analysis is not properly appreciated?
I’m glad to report that if Chairman Liao feels the questions too penatrating, we can always push forward and perform an emergency autopsy to discover if the cause of discomfort was hot air produced by global warming or deadly greenhouse gas methane buildup. Maybe we can conclude he just lost his fracking perspective by not considering alternate forms of extraction for natural gas.
“•a pill or a patch that would induce nausea when people eat meat”
What kind of methane emissions can we expect when the whole world is eating beans and alfalfa sprouts? How about a pill or patch to supress nausea when we’re eating our Soylent Green or reading tosh like this.
“•embryo selection or hormonal modification to make people smaller”
So we can divide the world into Morlocks and Eloi.
•drugs to enhance empathy and altruism, because “higher empathy levels correlate with stronger environmental behaviors”
You mean like Soma (Brave New World) or like in the Stepford Wives or a host of other science nightmares. Of course, the elite, won’t take this stuff. They have to keep their heads clear to decide who lives and who dies in this utopia.
•a fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family to limit the number of children
Carbontraception?
Surely, this must be a spoof? Please tell me it is.
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Robert M wrote: “Hmmm, when I read this, I thought of the movie “Serenity”
Glad to see another Browncoat. That movie and accompanying TV series Firefly has a lot of intelligent comment to make about belief and authority. They are my favourites. I think a lot of the fans don’t get most of the metaphors though.
Hint: Jaynestown/Jonestown; mudders milk/Kool Aid
blind faith/utter conviction leads to atrocity
pax = peace
Quorum wrote: “We really need a good World War…”
Oxymoron