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As Soon as Possible

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The latest contrarian crowd pleaser from Soon et al (2023) is just the latest repetition of the old “it was the sun wot done it” trope[1] that Willie Soon and his colleagues have been pushing for decades. There is literally nothing new under the sun.

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References

  1. W. Soon, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, S. Akasofu, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, A. Bianchini, W. Briggs, C. Butler, R. Cionco, M. Crok, A. Elias, V. Fedorov, F. Gervais, H. Harde, G. Henry, D. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D. Legates, A. Lupo, S. Maruyama, P. Moore, M. Ogurtsov, C. ÓhAiseadha, M. Oliveira, S. Park, S. Qiu, G. Quinn, N. Scafetta, J. Solheim, J. Steele, L. Szarka, H. Tanaka, M. Taylor, F. Vahrenholt, V. Velasco Herrera, and W. Zhang, "The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data", Climate, vol. 11, pp. 179, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179

Scafetta comes back for more

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A new paper from Scafetta and it’s almost as bad as the last one.

Back in March, we outlined how a model-observations comparison paper in GRL by Nicola Scafetta (Scafetta, 2022a) got wrong basically everything that one could get wrong (the uncertainty in the observations, the internal variability in the models, the statistical basis for comparisons – the lot!). Now he’s back with a new paper in a different journal (Scafetta, 2022b) that could be seen as trying to patch the holes in the first one, but while he makes some progress, he now adds some new errors while attempting CPR on his original conclusions.

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References

  1. N. Scafetta, "Advanced Testing of Low, Medium, and High ECS CMIP6 GCM Simulations Versus ERA5‐T2m", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 49, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2022GL097716
  2. N. Scafetta, "CMIP6 GCM ensemble members versus global surface temperatures", Climate Dynamics, vol. 60, pp. 3091-3120, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06493-w

The modern demarcation problem

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Defining (and enforcing) a clear line between information and mis-information is impossible, but that doesn’t mean misinformation doesn’t exist or that there is nothing to be done to combat it.

I found myself caught in an ‘interesting’ set of exchanges on twitter a few weeks ago (I won’t link to it to spare you the tedium, but you could probably find it if you look hard enough). The nominal issue was whether deplatforming known bull******s was useful at stemming the spread of misinformation (specifically with respect to discussions around COVID). There is evidence that this does in fact work to some extent, but the twitter thread quickly turned to the question of who decides what is misinformation in the first place, and then descended into a free-for-all where just the very mention that misinformation existed or that the scientific method provided a ratchet to detect it, was met with knee-jerk references to the Nazi’s and the inquisition. So far, so usual, right?

While the specific thread was not particularly edifying, and I’ll grant that my tweets were not perfectly pitched for the specific audience, this is a very modern example of the classic Demarcation Problem (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) in the philosophy of science.

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