Vaccination Scares and Other Nonsense

In 1998, a research paper in the journal Lancet entitled "Ileal lymphoid nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" linked the standard vaccine for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) to a new type of disorder in the autism spectrum. The news media (in typical fashion) produced headlines and parents everywhere were scared to vaccinate their children against diseases that could cripple or kill them. I have had friends and family members talk about allowing others to carry the societal burden for immunization (that is, depend on herd immunity) based on this study and others that rely on it for their foundation.

So, how many of you have now seen the news media in any form trumpet headlines that the FULL paper has been retracted? Everything in the article is "scrubbed" from scientific literature. That means if you cited the paper in your paper for support, it is likely that your paper will be scrutinized next. The good thing is that no one was EVER able to reproduce the results of Wakefield's study. Here is a damning quote by the BMJ (British Medical Journal):

Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare.

So, what's the big deal? Well, when we allow JUNK SCIENCE to dominate the headlines and then put retractions as footnotes on the back page, the public has a FALSE image that vaccinations are dangerous.  Vaccinations have wiped small pox from the earth, made polio a rarity, and saved millions of lives from other deadly diseases. The real truth is that the original paper should never have been published. The main author (Andrew Wakefield) failed to disclose a couple of small conflicts of interests like the fact that he was hired by a law firm to produce evidence against the multiple disease shot and that he studied children from anti-vaccine groups instead of those from a randomly drawn sample (Guardian article with more details).

The American has more details of the whole issue.  It is a good read on why you should NOT rely on herd immunity.  Here is the sub-head from the article.

The campaign against the most valuable medical technologies ever invented is based on junk science.

Brian Deer has worked for 13 years to kill this whole scam.  Here is the full story:

• How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed.

So, if you are on the fence about vaccinations, don't give it a second thought.  Herd immunity is a good theory until REALITY hits and your child is sick with something that could have been prevented by a small needle.

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BTW, stuff likes this vaccine fraud finally being put to rest will probably bring me back to blogging now that Global Warming (no, I mean) Climate Change (sorry again, I meant) Global Climate Disruption (well, what I really meant was) Climate Challenges advocates have "almost" lost the argument. I say almost because they will remain around until the paradigm shift works through academia over the next 20 years.

Quick Hits - Aftermath of Climate Gate

Missing Heat Update
Some of you may recall that I commented on NCAR looking for "missing heat" almost two years ago.  Here is a link to that post. Kevin Trenberth and his buddies are still worried about this fictitious heat.  Roger Pielke, Sr., a leading climate expert (to me that means he doesn't rely on computer models), dissects the real issues with Trenberth et al at Watts Up With That.  Here was my original explanation and my views haven't changed in the last two years (this was one of Kristy's favorite):

• "Here is my final explanation for the location of the missing heat. It is in the same place where you guys keep the $20+ billion dollars of hard earned taxes spent on the AGW modeling boondoggle. Vanished, like the proverbial fart in the wind."

Global Warming Now Causes Volcanoes
Well, that is essentially the conclusion in this news article.  Is there anything that doesn't cause or result from global warming?  Well, apparently not.

• "Now that's funny.  I don't care who you are." -- Larry the Cable Guy

Really Quick Hits
How much has your state "warmed" in the 104 year climate record?  You can find out at Watts Up With That.

• Arkansas has COOLED by 0.2 degrees (you couldn't detect this in a room in which you were sitting) during all this global warming. 

Once again, Watts Up With That tells you about the final nails in the coffin on the famous hockey stick graph.

• This is the graph that Al Gore uses to scare school children, and once again, we find it to be a total fiction.

Well, that clears out my feed reader of climate stories.  The bad science is still out there, but "Junk Science" has even moved the global warming stuff to the back burner.  The editor there believes that Climategate was the final bell tolling for the flawed science of AGW.

Vindication

Many of you have personally witnessed me get passionate about why I think anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a hoax.  Secretly, I think Walt, Josh and Zach probably believe I am in serious need of some medication based on the looks I get from them when we have talked about this subject. Well, over the last few days, I have gotten some confirmation that I am not totally out there in the weeds when I discount the "science"  of AGW.  Here it is from Walt's favorite source:  Glenn Beck.

The last few days have felt pretty good for those of us who questioned this stuff. Normally, I think "hackers" are the pretty lowly, but in this case, I will make an exception.

Return to Illumination Hour

I am re-posting this rant from last March. It was one of my first few posts (March 26, 2008). We are planning a similar party this year for Saturday, March 28. We will have help from 4 more people because my brother Adam and his family will be visiting. Illumination Hour will take place between 8:30 and 9:30 pm. Join us from your house if you get the chance.

As a side note, Rush Limbaugh jumped on this Thursday afternoon during his show. I am wondering if he was an early adopter of MPU as a daily read. Also, the "on the hour" radio news this morning has noted that there several businesses around the country doing Illumination Hour rather than Earth Hour.

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"Who Doesn't Want to Wear the Ribbon"
Originally posted March 26, 2008

Over the years I have been amazed at the absolutely meaningless gestures that people will go through to prove that they care about something. Many of you will recognize the post title from Kramer's run-in with some "street toughs" over his refusal to wear an AIDS awareness ribbon.



I guess everyone on the planet except me knows that having more ribbons on your lapel than Patton means that you care more about the rain forest, AIDS research, breast cancer, etc. than someone who doesn't wear them. Somehow this makes sense. Which brings me to what has many jazzed today, Earth Hour.

In case you don't know (I didn't until this morning), Earth Hour is a ritual that the inventors of Earth Day have brought us this year. Next Saturday (March 29) between 8 and 9 pm, we are supposed to power down "non-essential" electrical appliance and turn off all of our lights to show that we care about energy conservation and reducing our carbon footprint. Basically, the idea is to produce a voluntary blackout for an hour to reflect on the evilness of our comfortable but very energy intensive lifestyle. Jay Currie has a very different idea.

I have never read his blog before today, but from this post I get the idea that he is just about as tired of empty gestures as I am. He has decided to "Just Say No!" by keeping his lights on (ALL of them) during Earth Hour. I get confused on the inspiration for the idea but Tim Blair has planned an Illumination Hour on March 29 between 8 and 9 pm. As my buddy Chip would say, "What are the odds?" A couple of Tim's dedicated readers have decided to take it a step further and have a Carbon Party.

That is my kind of activism. During their HOUR OF POWER, it sounds like they plan on some sort of steel cage death match between the AC unit and the furnace with the winner getting to dominate the household environment for an hour. They also plan to run their vehicles, all electronic equipment, oven, and the washer and dryer. The hope is that they will consume enough electricity during the hour to more than offset any conservation accomplished during the Earth Hour.

If you're interested in becoming part of Illumination Hour to make a mockery of according to Samantha Burns, "Earth Hour stupidity, and all it represents," then visit her web page and sign the official online petition. If you don't have the activist, petition-signing bent, just forget what your Dad always told you for an hour and leave the light on when you leave a room this Saturday night.

Or better yet, you could call Motel 6 and ask them to keep several lights on for you.

For Those of You That Still Doubt the Agenda...

Ok. Thanks to all commentators (Josh, Kristy, Annie, and Lora Lee) for encouraging me to continue writing for a while longer. A day doing hands-on "approach to critical experiments" with highly enriched uranium (HEU) in the famed Superblock facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has given me some inspiration to find something to write about. For those that don't know (no offense, but I am pretty sure that is almost anyone that is not a nuclear geek or anti-nuclear protester), Superblock is LLNL's plutonium research facility. Here are some pictures from previous classes (if you look closely, you can see the cute little PU [plutonium] skunk on the lab coats). They have been taking pictures during the class, so eventually my class will make onto that site.

So, it took me about 10 minutes of web surfing to find something that really ticked me off. To me, it also proved that government science is not what it once was. On August 4th, Anthony Watts posted a story about a negative trend in the carbon dioxide level as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory for the first time since the measurements began. On August 5th, Anthony decided to check the data again. Amazingly, the data has CHANGED less than 24 hours after his post. Anthony has a very nice blink comparator of the changes to the data that occurred.

What's the big deal? Well, for one thing, the increasing trend in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is one of the driving forces behind "Cap and Trade" legislation for energy producers and huge carbon taxes on individuals. If the trend was started to go negative despite increased energy production in such places as China and India, it would conclusively show that humanity has little effect on the already trace amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In any case, I couldn't find a statement of the NOAA website that either explained why the data had been changed (or even that it had changed). There is a disclaimer on the site that says it is "subject to change." We are talking about a measurement with an instrument. If my data from experiments (like those today) were "subject to change," no one would ever have confidence in me as a nuclear scientist and my ethics would be called into question (especially if all my changes favored my hypotheses). It is truly astonishing the amount of change that is tolerated in the name of climate science.

Anthony was a little more industrious (you can see how if you read his post) and got an answer that satisfied him. A commentator on Watt's Up With That summarized my entire problem with this adjustment:

• "The changes go all the way back to 1974 (for those who haven’t seen the other thread). I sometimes theorize that NOAA & GISS must have time machines that allow them to get new readings 34+ years after the fact. I can imagine no other reason that policy makers base decisions worth hundreds of billions on an ever-shifting chimera of data."

We are being asked to support further research on global warming by people that are not only adjusting temperature data on a monthly basis, but they are also now adjusting carbon dioxide measurements (not model calculations) that go back over 30 years. To me, this requires faith in both the time travel abilities of these teams and a high confidence in their ethical standards. I just don't have either. And until James Hanson or Pieter Tans (the latest data adjuster) walk on water, I never will.

AND, I will continue to believe that the whole man-made global warming thing is a big grab for governmental control of our lives.

Stupid Human Assumption

Early this week, I experienced another "poke the monkey" episode (see the comment section). This time, my loyal commenter, Josh, sent me a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article that links global warming with increased incidence of kidney stones (here is press coverage that attempts to explain the journal article). In a previous post (Wanted: Fact Checker), I talked about the seeming lack of rigor in the peer review process at PNAS. I don't think peer review was the problem in this case, but the article does have some serious issues.

The first serious issue that I have with the journal article is well covered at Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit website. Here is the kernal of importance from Steve's site:

• "... it turns out that the current kidney stone dataset is not so good for a variety of reasons. These include undiagnosed, asymptomatic stones, lack of correct documentation of recurring events, or those who just plain don’t go to the hospital. In fact, there could be up to a 35% error in the baseline prevalence of kidney stone disease! See, reconstructing climate records is nothing compared to ascertaining a census of those suffering of kidney stones."

Apparently, we really don't know how many people suffer from kidney stones very well. Since we don't this number now, how will we be able to determine whether a future increase in kidney stone incidence is due to medical science improvements in kidney stone diagnosis or to increased temperature caused by global warming.

The other real issue I have with this sort of study is that it makes the classic assumption of "stupid humans". I don't follow kidney stone medical literature, but from what I can gather, a mean annual temperature above a certain degree (I think it is 13 degrees C) is correlated with increased risk of kidney stones. Basically, where it's hot, there is higher percentage of the population that is diagnosed with kidney stones.

The authors of the study assumed the worst case among the climate scenarios published by the IPCC (SRESa1b) and placed the GCM modeled temperature increases on top of today's instrumented temperature record to get mean temperatures in the future. I have no problem with this except for my well-known objections to GCMs that I will lay aside for now. What we end up with is a greatly expanded "Kidney Stone Belt" in the southern and southwestern U.S.

Where does the "stupid human assumption" come into play? In the press account, we find out the best way to prevent kidney stones is to simply drink more water. The authors implicitly assume that humans will not change their behavior in response to climate shifts. Does that make sense to you? I know if I started hearing about 30% rises in kidney stones among my neighbors, I would start drinking more water. Actually, the response of an individual to this sort of increased risk is "so easy even a caveman could do it."

Finally, an interesting tidbit that came out on Climate Audit: "The SE United States has actually undergone slight cooling over the past century." Isn't that a kick in the pants to the authors? It is cooling in the present Kidney Stone Belt.

Now, if there were just someway to tell me if the authors of this study are looking for more funding of kidney stone research... Ahhh, there it is. "The related cost of the predicted increase in kidney stones would be $900 million to $1.3 billion as the kidney stone belt expands northward and westward from warming, the researchers said."

As my buddy Chip would say, "What ARE the odds!?!"

Ho Hum, Physicist Claims End Is Near, Again!

OK. These days I am struggling through the day to get my work done with a nagging ailment (see Item 7, Number 3 here). So, finding new material for posts on subjects that I am used to writing about has becoming very secondary when I get a free moment. Luckily, I have friends like Cable and Brett (guest blogger extraordinaire) to, as Kristy says, "Poke the monkey."

A couple of days ago, I arrived at work to an email from Brett asking me what I thought about this article. If you don't feel like going through the effort of clicking the link, here is the summary. The international physics community (along with many governments) has gotten together to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the border between France and Switzerland. Some people including physicist and lawyer (that's a real combination) Walter E. Wagner have filed a lawsuit in Hawaii (somehow this group thinks that the state of Hawaii has jurisdiction over an international accelerator located in Europe). The lawsuit seeks to prevent the facility start up because there is "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet (emphasis added)." I quote the lawsuit because I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to do so.

This would be extremely funny if it was the first time Wagner and his group tried to stop an accelerator from starting up. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory faced an essentially identical lawsuit back in the late 1990's. RHIC overcame that legal challenge and has been operating (or destroying the world depending on your perspective, I guess) since mid-2000.

Perhaps physicists bring this on themselves by being somewhat flippant in the face of grave questions or before world changing experiments. For example, Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) tells us that to lighten the mood shortly before the first ever test of a nuclear weapon (Trinity test at White Sands Missile Range), Enrico Fermi offered to take bets from other physicists on whether or not the fission implosion weapon would ignite the atmosphere. He also allowed the side bet as to whether this ignition would just destroy New Mexico or the whole world. None of the physicists really believed that this would happen (a few weeks before Edward Teller had done the calculations anyway), but the soldiers were not so sure of the outcome after listening to the wagers being proferred.

Anyway, my first reaction to these claims of world destruction by physicists is to chuckle whether the prediction is made by giants like Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller or by Lilliputians like Walter Wagner, James Hansen, or Gavin Schmidt. That's what the giants would want while the others will never understand why I am laughing at them.

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By the way, gout is a real b&*^%. Avoid it like the plague if at all possible. I have had trouble walking the last few days because of the pain in my foot.

Crimes Against Humanity?

I received an email recently from one of my grad school buddies (who shall remain nameless) asking the following question:

• "When are you going to write about the article on Drudge about the NASA chief calling for oil company executives to be charged with crimes against humanity? This has so many great angles, government employees calling for citizens to be charged in an international court, a scientist who would rather imprison a voice of dissent rather than argue the scientific merits of his position, the whole tie in with former NASA employees who had a different opinion."

Well, my first response was that this had to be a joke that he was playing on me to get me to post something silly. So, I did a little research on the matter. While it wasn't the "NASA chief" making these claims, it was James Hanson, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Father of AGW Science Scare Tactics. Most people leave off the "Scare Tactics" portion of his title, but I like to be thorough and complete in my writing. Hanson is also the guy that will tell you that he was "censored" by the Bush administration for having to put his NASA related (i.e., government funded) public presentations through the standard review and approval process required for ALL government releases of information. If you read this Guardian article, he doesn't sound at all censored to me. He sounds like a stark raving lunatic.

The email question says it best. A government scientist is calling for trials of the oil company executives for funding research in an area that just MIGHT affect the bottom line of their companies. Are these international trials going to be held in Salem, Massachusetts? Will I (and thousands of other scientists that don't believe that AGW is a big deal) be "invited" to attend these trials or will we just be dragged there and put in the stockade while the world "experts" selected and funded by Hanson's agency determine our fate?

Let's back up a second: High crimes against humanity? I think he is placing these executives and scientists in the same category as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, and the list goes on. Failure to believe in JUNK SCIENCE that tells us that a trace gas will cause all sorts of havoc if we don't sacrifice to the AGW gods is now morally equivalent to genocide in the mind of Hanson (and some others). Someone please tell me that "Dr." Hanson will be back on his meds soon. If not, please tell me that he will be relieved of his duties at NASA before the Bush administration leaves office next January (it should happen TODAY).

Well, Cable (I mean, "nameless"), that is all the energy I have on the subject for now. Perhaps, I will get to write on this again before the United Nations-Tribunal for Deniers of the Significance of Anthropogenic Global Warming (UN-TDSAGW*) assembles in Salem. If not, writing MPU has been a fun ride.

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*Perhaps this acronym will become as common and recognizable as UNICEF, but I sincerely hope not.

Dude, What Are You Thinking?

There is a country song by Dierks Bentley that goes something like "Well, I know what I was feeling, But What was I thinking?" What brought this song to mind? I was reading this article about "Australia's best known expert on global warming" and found out that he thinks that the global warming situation is much worse now than it was just 3 years ago.

As I read his proposed solution to our "problem," I forgot all about the fact that the global temperature has stayed the same (perhaps even cooled) since 1998, so how could it be much worse? Right? I just kept saying to myself as I read further, "Dude, what are you thinking?" In any case, I am going to tell you what he is feeling.

Tim Flannery has proposed that the world should start polluting like crazy. Well, that is a little bit of a paraphrase, but he really does want to use jets traveling across the globe to disperse sulfur into the upper atmosphere. The sulfur would reflect sunlight back into space before it makes it to the surface. Of course, the sulfur will change the color of the sky. And, for those of you who have paid attention over the years, sulfur emissions in the form of sulfur dioxide from various industrial enterprises, including electricity generation from coal, are one of the main ingredients in acid rain. In the U.S., we have even reduced the amount of sulfur that we allow in diesel fuels to limit this sulfur dioxide pollution (and increase the cost of the fuel).

You might think that Flannery has at least modeled the effect of dumping large amounts of sulfur into the upper atmosphere or thought about what burning "extra" sulfur in jet fuel might do to the engines. You would be wrong. Here is a quote, "The consequences of doing that are unknown." However, he is one those "Don't just stand there, do something!" (even if it is wrong or dumb) kind of guys.

Anyway, I promised to tell you what this global warming "expert" is feeling. Dr. Flannery is now beginning to realize that the scientific basis for the cause that he has dedicated much of his professional life is crumbling like a house of cards. He is feeling desperate to justify his existence as a climate scientist and the money he has spent on climate research over the years. So, he feels that he needs to emphasize the urgency of our dire situation.

Well, it's either that or he is just a plain old fashioned kook. I'll leave that for you to decide, but I will tell you that I have made up my mind about Dr. Flannery.

WANTED: Fact Checker.

Back before we got married, Kristy was looking for a summer job. She is a good writer and worked for the school newspaper. So, she went to the local paper (The Mena Star) and asked if they were looking for proofreaders because she had noticed about 25 errors in the stories on the first couple of pages. After demonstrating her ability to find these errors with a highlighter, she was told "We don't really need a proofreader." What does this have to do with anything I've written about thus far? Not much except that ironies like those observed in that story and in this article tend to make me chuckle a bit.

The article is a press release about a paper in the April 7, 2008 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The authors of the PNAS paper discuss the massive global ozone depletion that would happen if 100 Hiroshima size (20 kiloton) weapons were detonated above cities in the northern subtropics. I am sure that it is a nice paper on a new fangled global chemistry-climate model. There is just one tiny problem. This experiment was actually performed by the U.S., U.S.S.R, France, China, and England between 1945-1963. These five nations accounted for approximately 650 atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons.

In the time before the "Partial Test Ban Treaty," the U.S. tested over 300 nuclear devices in the atmosphere. Some of the devices tested by these nations were almost 1,000 times the size of the Hiroshima weapon (Ivy Mike, Castle Bravo, and Tsar Bomba). Now, the chemistry-climate model might not be exactly linear with weapon yield, but it seems that we did not have a nuclear winter after these tests (unless my history texts left out some pretty important events).

It is times like this when I would NOT want to be a peer reviewer for a journal like PNAS. When you don't even recognize the difference between the virtual reality of a computer simulation and physical reality, it is time to go out and buy Trinity and Beyond.

And just maybe the National Academy of Sciences will be posting a position for "Fact Checker" in the near future.

Finding Comfort In Junk Science Judo

In the fall of 1996, I was in a Health Physics class at Texas A&M University with a bunch of new faces. Early in the semester (it might have been the first day), we were discussing risk analysis and the actuarial risk of various activities. As part this discussion, a table from Bernard Cohen's book (Before It's Too Late: A Scientist's Case For Nuclear Energy) was showed to the class. The table was titled "Average Loss of Life Expectancy (LLE)" and here is an extraction of the highlights that Avery (one of my new classmates) thought applied to him:


Activity Causing LLE (Days of LLE)

• Being male (2800)
• Being unmarried (2000)
• Smoking cigarettes, 1 pk/day (1600)
• Being poor (700)
• 15 lb overweight (450)
• Accidents (435)
• Driving a car (20)
• Alcohol (130)
• Occupational Accidents (74)
• Small cars vs. standard size cars (50)
• Falls (39) [Avery was kind of clumsy.]
• Radiation worker entire adult life (12)
  

When Avery totaled up the days, he proclaimed that it was 21.5 years. At this point, he stopped the class by saying, "I can't handle this! Those numbers can't be true! If they are, I am living on borrowed time." These numbers have probably changed a little bit since Cohen's publication in 1983, but Avery's logic path was one that is commonly tread in medical science journalism today. However, I am pretty sure that he was just being funny.

We are bombarded daily with media reports of ecological type of epidemiological studies that tells us something like, "Men who eat green cheese are 21% more likely to need vision correction... Dr. Joe Blow is encouraged that green cheese lovers may save millions of dollars in eye care related expenses each year by simply moderating their consumption of this offensive dietary item. Dr. Blow also stated that more research is needed on this health care crisis." Like this story, almost every one of this studies reported on a daily basis is pure, unadulterated bunk.

Epidemiologists tend to believe that relative risks between 0.5 - 2.0 imply, at best, weak associations, and that studies such as the green cheese study above should be viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of the nature of this epidemiological method and the data quality that comes from ecological studies. (Ecological studies are observational studies where data is collected on populations rather than individual subjects.) This is true because statistical correlation doesn't mean that you have identified a true cause and effect relationship.

Steve Milloy has an excellent tutorial on how to recognize and debunk junk science, so I won't spend time trying to redo his work. I don't have definitive proof, but I think Mark Twain was referring to these "researchers" when he wrote that "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics." What I find more than a little disturbing is that we are allow these grabs at taxpayer money by pseudo-scientists that abuse both true research methods and statistics. Until we can find a way to combat junk science, I guess I will have to find comfort in the fact that when I find purple wild flowers growing in the northwest portion of my freshly mowed yard, I really don't have a 4% increased risk of developing testicular cancer.

The Stench of a Paper Mill

How many of you out there have ever driven through a town that has a paper mill as one of its primary industries? If you have, you know the distinctive smell of the methyl mercaptan emanating from the mill that makes you feel kind of sick as you speed out of town. The conspiracy theorist in me makes note of the fact that one of the biggest speed traps in Arkansas is right outside of a town with a booming paper mill. If you haven't had the pleasure of smelling a paper mill, just think of decaying matter or swamp gas, and you are in the right ballpark.

By now, some of you are wondering if I haven't been sniffing too many of those chemicals. However, those of you who have been with me from the beginning know how I despise the low level of information that it is found in most scientific papers today. I found the same stench of decay in this 2001 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The article is about how to bulk up a Curriculum Vitae (CV) for those academics striving for recognition and tenure. The article states that the creative researchers pad their paper count by changing the parameters on their graphs. This is definitely a creative way to scam the system of "publish or perish" found in many university environments, but it also reeks. According to the article, if I have a theoretical idea, an experimental way to test it, and a comparison of the experimental results with the theoretical predictions, that is worthy three separate publications (and at least of couple of citations).

To me, these are three aspects related to a common set of information and would make AN excellent paper. I am willing to consider exceptions to this if it takes several months to years to perform one or each of the three phases (theory, experiment, and comparison). However, if you are publishing 57 articles (19 as the lead author) in a single year, I don't believe you would find your way into my exemption category. [By the way, I have electronic copies of all eight of the peer reviewed journal articles that bear my name. I would be happy to share them and discuss the information content of any of them.]

I have a few thoughts/questions for aspiring young scientists that are quite different than those presented in the article. First, do you really have a grasp of your chosen field if you are just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks? Next, are you being considerate of the peer review process (someone has to read and evaluate your submission) by bombarding the system with papers that are marginally within the MPU for the journal? Finally, do you think the wretched smells of an academic paper mill will be safely left in the lab when you are challenged about the quality rather than quantity of your research effort?

"But where does the HEAT go?"

I was reminded of a scene from Seinfeld when I read this article on the missing heat of global warming. The scene is one where Kramer and Elaine are sitting in the hallway of Elaine's building. Elaine asks to borrow Kramer's deli slicer and Kramer doesn't want to part with it. After Elaine demonstrates that she has sufficient knowledge to use the darn thing, Kramer frustratedly asks, "But where does the MEAT go?"

Why does the article remind me of this? Well, other than the fact that I can typically relate any life situation back to Seinfeld, I can just hear the Josh Willis (JPL), Kevin Trenberth (NCAR), or pick your favorite global warming believer at NASA saying in fit of frustration, "But where does the HEAT go?" So, I thought I would give them at least three plausible explanations: (1) The heat doesn't exist; (2) The heat is being radiated to space and is of no consequence; or (3) The heat trapped by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is so small it can't be detected by our crude instruments and is of no consequence.

I have asked myself why this article hacked me off so much, and I finally decided that it is the fact that the theory of anthrogenic global warming (AGW) was being treated in this article like it belongs in the big leagues with the Law of Conservation of Energy and the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum. You can put your trust in these two laws, but I wouldn't bet my Diet Coke much less my farm on AGW.

Let me give you an example. Back in 1911, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn found that when a radioactive sample undergoes beta decay, the electron that is emitted can have any energy up to some maximum value and that the angular momentum of the reaction didn't add up. Big deal, right? RIGHT! The first item violates the Law of Conservation of Energy, and the second item violates the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum. Well, this caused a stir until 1930 when Wolfgang Pauli postulated that another particle that we didn't have the technology to detect was emitted along with the electron and this invisible particle carried away the right amount of energy and angular momentum. In 1934, Enrico Fermi (my favorite physicist) wrote the paper that forms the basis for our current understanding of the beta decay process and called that particle a neutrino. A neutrino wasn't physically detected until 1956, but we KNEW neutrinos were there because we could trust these two laws.

Here is the part that really gets me about the article, not only does the ocean not have the extra heat to warm it up that it must have for AGW to be true, the ocean temperatures have cooled since 2003 (but according to the article, that isn't really significant). This means that the oceans are not even getting the heat that they are supposed to get to keep a constant temperature. They cannot even get the DIRECTION of the temperature change right!!!

So, let me get this straight. You can't do the energy balance calculations close enough to get the temperature change to go in the right direction, but you want me to trust you that there is some mysterious missing AGW heat out there that we haven't found.

Here is my final explanation for the location of the missing heat. It is in the same place where you guys keep the $20+ billion dollars of hard earned taxes spent on the AGW modeling boondoggle. Vanished, like the proverbial fart in the wind.

A Nuclear Engineer's View of Validation

As a nuclear engineer, I use radiation physics codes quite a bit. We use the computer software to model radiation effects experiments, to perform reactor safety calculations, and to complete nuclear criticality safety analysis. For us, the regulatory framework that we operate in requires that we validate the software thoroughly. By validation, I mean we compare the computer modeling results with a real world measurement of those results. In fact, the radiation transport and nuclear physics communities have performed many experiments using simple physical geometries and well-known material compositions designed to be modeled exactly by our computer codes. These are known as benchmark experiments, and I have performed both reactor benchmark experiments and code calculations for comparisons (link).

These comparisons are quite rigorous and quantitative. For instance, our transport codes will predict the benchmark experiments to less than 1% difference for the neutron multiplication factor. When we predict things like radiation doses and particles crossing certain boundaries, we generally don't do quite as well. Those quantities are usually predicted to within 5-20% depending on the complexity of the benchmark. These results allow us to use our software with confidence for problems that are similar in scope (same energy region, similar materials, etc.) to the benchmarks because we have demonstrated that the software code has the appropriate physics and material models.

So, here is excerpt from the abstract of an article: "Using quantitative proxy models of peat and bauxite formation, based upon modern analogues, predictions of the distribution of peats (coals) and bauxites for both the Late Jurassic (Kimmeridgian) and midCretaceous (Cenomanian) have been made using a General Circulation Model (GCM)." After saying to myself, "That's a load of BS!", I decided to write down why this is such a poor way to do computer modeling and why this is NOT validation.

Here is a clause by clause translation of the abstract from BS-ese to English:

• "Using quantitative proxy models of peat and bauxite formation ..." --> I took numbers from somebody's (another graduate student in my research group) model of peat and bauxite formation. I won't tell you where the numbers came from or how that model was constructed because the graduate student is a computer science major and knows absolutely nothing about geology.

• "..., based upon modern analogues, ..." --> We really don't know how these formations develop, we can't observe their formation happening anywhere today, but my collaborator at another university has a guess at something that supports my argument in this paper. Most people will just read right past this clause anyway.

• "...predictions of the distribution of peats (coals) and bauxites for both the Late Jurassic (Kimmeridgian) and midCretaceous (Cenomanian) have been made using a General Circulation Model (GCM)." --> I know we use GCMs to model the atmosphere and oceans and make wild guesses about climate, but I am going to show you where to find coal and aluminum ore using these magic codes. If you bought the load in the first couple of clauses, I bet that I can sell you the even bigger load to finish the sentence.
  

After reading the abstract, I decided not to finish the article. I did read on to find the funding source for the research. This load was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The NERC makes this claim on their homepage, "NERC funds world-class science in universities and our own research centres that increases knowledge and understanding of the natural world."

I will definitely admit to a general bias against climate models because I am unsure how much of what they do is truly science as opposed to computer science. For the sake of discussion, let's say that it is. Will someone please tell me the "world class" aspect of this paper? I KNOW that Sandia does world class science and engineering (examples), so I am pretty sure that I would recognize when something is in that category. If a co-worker brought this to me at Sandia as part of our internal peer review, it would get a "Not Recommended for Publication" rating. Saying this in another way, the article is well below the minimum information (science quota) that I would recommend for publication and is contributing to the decrease that I mentioned in For Starters. The sad thing is that the authors now have this article as a peer-reviewed publication (in the Journal of the Geological Society) on their CVs.

In summary, this article is NOT validation of any kind because the results are never compared to something that we can physically measure. At best, this is a verification that the modeling team writing the article has the same general physics models in their computer software as another computer code that models coal and aluminum ore formation. This is a good example of what Steven Milloy calls "PlayStation Climatology."

To those of you who know me well enough to have pushed my global warming button, I hope that this post on the subject provides an insight into my cynicism or lack of concern about the dire predictions that surface every few days. I don't want to put our collective economic futures in the hands of people that do "science" in this way. I am going to end with a note to Walt and Annie. I think that this is the type of stuff that you guys wanted me to write about. If it's not, leave me a comment and tell me where I went astray and suggestions for other posts.