1974 : Guardian Warned Of A New Ice Age

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Tony Heller

The Guardian claims now that there never was an ice age scare. The one they said was coming fast in 1974.

Screenshot 2015-12-30 at 01.57.11 AM

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48 Responses to 1974 : Guardian Warned Of A New Ice Age

  1. Gail Combs says:
    December 30, 2015 at 10:43 am

    Nigel Calder who was there in the UK reporting on the coming ice age in the 1970s at the BBC.

    SEE:
    https://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/next-ice-age/

    https://calderup.wordpress.com/tag/gerard-roe/

    Who was Nigel Calder?

    Nigel Calder (1931-2014) spent a lifetime spotting and explaining the big discoveries in all branches of science, from particle physics to human social behaviour.

    After army service, graduation from Cambridge University, and two years’ work as a research physicist for the Philips Group, he began his apprenticeship as a science writer on the original staff of the New Scientistin 1956. He became editor of that magazine in 1962. From 1966 until his death, he worked as an independent author and television scriptwriter. For his work for BBC-TV in scripting and sometimes presenting a long succession of “science specials”, filmed world-wide and typically 2 hours in duration with accompanying books, Calder won the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science. These and other programmes for BBC-TV spanned the years 1966 (“Russia: Beneath the Sputniks”) to 1981 (“The Comet is Coming!”).

    As a member of the Initiative Group for the Foundation Scientific Europe, Maastricht, from 1986 to 1989, he was general editor of its book Scientific Europe,with contributions from 92 distinguished scientists and engineers in 20 countries. After an interlude reconnoitring and scripting a world-wide TV series “Spaceship Earth”for Channel 4, Calder returned to the European theme. From 1991 to 2006, much of his work was for the European Space Agency, communicating the results and plans of its science programme in books, live TV broadcasts, videos, on-line video talks, exhibitions and press releases…..
    https://calderup.wordpress.com/about/

    Nigel also wrote “The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice” (1974) published by the BBC.
    On the sleeve “The threat of a new Ice age turns out to be more ominous than the experts thought, even a few years ago”.

    Near the end of chapter 2, “The simplest and most likely reason is that the early part of this century represented a short break in the Little Ice Age, which is now resuming. The chief contrary hope must be that the cooling in the north that has proceeded since 1950 will reverse”.

    Reply
  2. Gail Combs says:
    December 30, 2015 at 10:59 am

    The first well known scientist to ring the alarm bell with this view was Stephn Schneider from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Science, June 9, 1971.)

    page 14 Climate Con?: History and Science of the Global Warming Scare
    By William B. Innes

    The Global Cooling Scare Revisited (‘Ice Age’ Holdren had plenty of company)

    ….Recent attention has been paid to the coming Ice Age talk of John Holdren and Steven Schneider before they got global warming religion….

    Here are some “global cooling” quotations and comments from an earlier era….

    A selection from that list

    – Stephen Schneider, Back cover endorsement, Lowell Ponte, The Cooling: Has The Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive It (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976).

    “Our climate has swung wildly from severe warming during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s to severe cooling during the 1960s. . . . The cooling is a fact.”

    ………………………………………………………….

    “In the early 1970s, the northern hemisphere appeared to have been cooling at an alarming rate. There was frequent talk of a new ice age. Books and documentaries appeared, hypothesizing a snowblitz or sporting titles such as The Cooling. Even the CIA got into the act, sponsoring several meetings and writing a controversial report warning of threats to American security from the potential collapse of Third World Governments in the wake of climate change.”

    – Stephen Schneider, Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989), p. 199.

    ………………………………………………………….

    “Some climatologists believe that the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, may decline by two or three degrees by the end of the century. If that climate change occurs, there will be megadeaths and social upheaval because grain production in high latitudes (Canada, northern regions of China and the Soviet Union) will decrease.”

    – Reid Bryson, “‘All Other Factors Being Constant . . .’ A Reconciliation of Several Theories of Climate Change,” in John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, eds., Global Ecology: Readings Towards a Rational Strategy for Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 84.

    Reply
    • Martin Smith says:
      December 30, 2015 at 11:45 am

      Gail, this is another example of your childishness. Holdren and Schneider were warning about the cooling effect of aerosols, which, during that period, were making the air in many US cities dangerous to breath. Holdren and Schneider were right, and we did something about it. We created the EPA, and the EPA cleaned up the air pollution. Mind you, they were removing aerosols that were causing health problems for a lot of people; they weren’t trying to avoid the cooling effect. Nevertheless, the cooling that Holdren and Schneider warned about ended, because we ended the aerosol pollution.

      But now the cooling affect is back, because China, India, and others are spewing out more aerosol pollution than the US and Europe did in the 20th century. It is having a cooling effect, but those countries have now decided to clean up their acts, so that cooling effect will diminish.

      There was no “Ice Age” scare in the 1970s. There were, however, serious warnings about aerosols. But we fixed the problem. That’s why the cooling ended.

      Did you really not know that? You posted a lot of verbiage again, but you seem to be ignorant of what it is all about.

      Reply
      • gator69 says:
        December 30, 2015 at 12:06 pm

        Amazing how Marty knows what drives cliamtes, when science does not.

        Reply
      • pinroot says:
        December 30, 2015 at 1:04 pm

        Did you even read the article which was referenced? No matter how many times Steven posts articles from that Era talking about the possibility of an approaching ice age, you show up with your passive-aggressive BS, totally ignoring reality, and placing your own spun on it. I would imagine the only reason you haven’t been banned is because you’re fun to laugh at.

        Reply
        • Martin Smith says:
          December 30, 2015 at 1:20 pm

          It is a newspaper article, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper, and it uses the term “Spaces satellites.” What other kind are there? You can’t prove the scientific community actually believed in a coming ice age by posting a newspaper article, especially one that refers to “Space satellites.”

          In fact, during the period in question, scientific papers about the coming global warming massively outnumbered scientific papers about the coming global cooling.

      • Gail Combs says:
        December 30, 2015 at 3:26 pm

        Again Marty practices sexism!

        He does not even bother to READ the TITLES much less the articles before attacking and thus makes a complete fool of himself.

        In the 1960s a respected geologist in his native Czechoslovakia, George Kukla, counted the layers of loess….

        A more definitive confirmation of Milankovitch came in 1976, in a paper by Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton, using Shackleton’s data in the figure above. But long before either that paper or my own, there was widespread behind-the-scenes acceptance of Milankovitch, and Kukla, for one, was concerned about the implications.

        Kukla warned President Nixon

        Those who rewrite the history of climate science to suit the man-made global warming hypothesis hate to be reminded that global cooling and the threat of a new ice age rang alarm bells in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Orwellian manner they try to airbrush out the distinguished experts involved, and to say it was just a scare story dreamed up by stupid reporters like me.

        No, we didn’t make it up. I was present in Rome in 1961 when global cooling was already the main concern at a conference of the World Meteorological Organization and Unesco (see the Unesco reference). The discussions were led by Hubert Lamb of the UK Met Office, who went on to found the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

        A persistent concern of Lamb and others was that the world might return to a Little Ice Age like that of 300 years ago….

        You catch that little Alarmist Troll?
        >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
        Kukla warned President Nixon!!!!
        >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

        The result was the 1974 CIA report: “A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems”
        And that report says point blank.

        “… Since 1972 the grain crisis has intensified…. Since 1969 the storage of grain has decreased from 600 million metric tons to less than 100 million metric tons – a 30 day supply… many governments have gone to great lengths to hide their agricultural predicaments from other countries as well as from their own people…

        pg 9
        The archaeologists and climatotologists document a rather grim history… There is considerable evidence that these empires may not have been undone by barbarian invaders but by climatic change…. has tied several of these declines to specific global cool periods, major and minor, that affected global atmospheric circulation and brought wave upon wave of drought to formerly rich agricultural lands.

        Refugees from these collapsing civilizations were often able to migrate to better lands… This would be of little comfort however,… The world is too densely populated and politically divided to accommodate mass migration.

        Page 18 talks of coming glaciation.
        Scientists are confident that unless man is able to effectively modify the climate, the northern regions… will again be covered with 100 to 200 feet of ice and snow. That this will occur within the nexy 2,500 years they are quite positive; that it may occur sooner is open to speculation.

        Not a damned thing about Schneider’s and Hansen’s attempts to blame mankind.

        Reply
  3. markstoval says:
    December 30, 2015 at 11:40 am

    I have actually argued (debate not possible) with educated people who claim there was never a “new ice age scare”. They say that there may have been a little idle speculation and a few Hollywood movies but that is all. But I was there! I was in university at the time and it was conventional wisdom that an ice age was coming.

    By the way Tony, they were right. They had the timing wrong, but there is an ice age coming. Interglacials don’t last forever.

    Reply
    • Martin Smith says:
      December 30, 2015 at 11:48 am

      No, mark, it wasn’t conventional wisdom. The science published about a possible ice age was dwarfed by the science published about the increasing greenhouse effect.

      >By the way Tony, they were right. They had the timing wrong, but there is an ice age
      >coming. Interglacials don’t last forever.

      Yes, mark, because the earth was cooling before the industrial revolution, and it would be cooling now, too, if we weren’t pumping 30+ gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

      Reply
      • gator69 says:
        December 30, 2015 at 12:09 pm

        So where is the peer reviewed list of all climate forcings, listed by hierarchy, and quantified?

        And where in the peer reviewed literature can we find that natural variabilty has been disproven?

        Reply
        • Gail Combs says:
          December 30, 2015 at 3:41 pm

          Like you I was in college taking chemistry in the late 1960s and early 70s. Just for fun I took a lot of geology courses. I even did a thesis paper in geology as well as in chemistry.

          And yes the ice age scare was talked of the geology department. There was all this exciting new work and discoveries were coming thick and fast.

          …So spirited was the debate over the contradictory findings that in 1965 the National Science Foundation held a special conference to try to settle the dispute. John Imbrie, then a professor of geology at Columbia University, attended the meeting, and later told the story of the controversy and its aftermath in his book, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery…
          At a meeting held in Paris in 1969, Imbrie announced the results that he had obtained when he studied a Caribbean core with this multiple-factor technique….

          At the Paris meeting Imbrie talked after the lecture with a British geophysicist named Nicholas Shackleton….
          Ice Ages Confirmed

          Of course the ill educated would never have any idea of who Imbrie, Shackleton and Hays are.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-Vn5AStFWo

          Alec Nisbett of BBC-TV filmed Kukla for our multinational TV blockbuster called “The Weather Machine”, broadcast in 1974. By then the count of ice ages had increased still further and the reasons for the comings-and-goings of the ice were better understood. And as you can view here (after a patch of narration read grandly by the actor Eric Porter) Kukla issued a warning — Nigel Calder

          George Kukla was awarded the European Geophysical Union’s Milankovitch Medal in 2004.

        • gator69 says:
          December 30, 2015 at 6:33 pm

          I was living and traveling in Europe during the ice age scare. I have always been a mountain loving freak, and spent as much time in the Alps as I could. The residents of mountain villages had been convinced by the scientific community that this global cooling was going to march alpine glaciers right through their scenic towns. I lived through it, and no wet behind the ears know-nothings can change that.

        • Gail Combs says:
          December 30, 2015 at 7:04 pm

          Gator, I was in Germany in 1974 -75. I too remember the worry about the glaciers (Got to ski the Zugspitze too.)

      • markstoval says:
        December 30, 2015 at 12:25 pm

        “No, mark, it wasn’t conventional wisdom. The science published about a possible ice age was dwarfed by the science published about the increasing greenhouse effect.”

        This is an absolute lie. Is your religion so weak that you have to tell lies about the past? I studied science in the early 70s and it was accepted that there was a coming ice age.

        Jumping on the bandwagon were several scientists who claimed that a war between the USA and Russia (if it went nuclear) would bring on “nuclear winter” and possibly destroy all life on earth. Ice was in baby!!

        Someday, dishonest people will claim they did not believe in CO2 warms the planet — they will say, “hell, everyone knows that violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics”

        ~ Mark

        Reply
      • pinroot says:
        December 30, 2015 at 1:09 pm

        Could you supply some of that published science on the greenhouse effect from that era? That way there would be some proof of what you say. And don’t tell me to go look for it; YOU made the claim, YOU back it up with facts. If you don’t, it will just prove what we already know, that you can’t back up your claims.

        Reply
        • Martin Smith says:
          December 30, 2015 at 1:23 pm

          Sure. I think this was the first guy to publish on the greenhouse effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect

        • Stewart Pid says:
          December 30, 2015 at 3:03 pm

          Martin you moron, pinroot said “from that era” … do try and stay on topic.
          Now show the published science from that era. I still have one of my texts from that era – Inadvertent Climate Modification, MIT 1971 ( I bet Martin has no Climate texts or science texts for that matter of any vintage) & one of the interesting quotes is that the science sez temperatures should be increasing but they are actually falling …. hmm …. curious isn’t it Moron?

      • Jason Calley says:
        December 30, 2015 at 1:24 pm

        Hey markstoval! As a physics major and science geek back in the 70s, global cooling and possible ice age is what I was reading about at the time. When CAGW first began to become popularly reported, I remember thinking, “Warming? Really? I guess the trend has turned. It was supposed to get colder…”

        Reply
        • Gail Combs says:
          December 30, 2015 at 7:15 pm

          Marty the Troll keeps thinking we are Gun-Toting Bible Thumping uneducated Bitter Clingers. The USDA pulled the underestimating crap too when they told their agents to address farmers at a grade school level. (Most farmers I know are college educated.)

      • Bartleby says:
        January 2, 2016 at 3:33 am

        Martin we haven’t exchange ideas before and I don’t expect we will in the future but I’ve read quite a few of your comments and must say you don’t concede points that have been won by others using factual data. It makes it pointless to discuss subjects with you since you apparently are unable to learn.

        During the 60’s and 70’s there was in fact a well publicized scientific *opinion* that the risk of an ice age was real. The same lame alarms were used; it was coming on “faster than ever before” and “something must be done” by the eco-terrorists of the day (not the scientists BTW). There was no scientific consensus on the subject, but there was serious discussion in the scientific community, who had not assigned a cause. It was the non-scientist alarmists who hypothesized aerosols, there were no scientific studies to support that hypothesis.

        I was there. It was just like the pseudo-scientific nonsense going on today. Everything old is new again.

        Reply
  4. cfgjd says:
    December 30, 2015 at 12:33 pm

    Warmest year even coming up, the “hiatus” has already ended:

    http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/fig/nov_wld.png

    Source: http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/nov_wld.html

    Looks like skeptic ideology is reaching bankruptcy, the much-touted hiatus has ended and Sun did not do it.

    Reply
    • gator69 says:
      December 30, 2015 at 1:02 pm

      Yes, after massive adjustments, this graph of artifacts shows warming. So what? Even if it is warming, it is still well within the bounds of natural variability, and natural variability has never been disproven.

      Skeptic ideology wins again!

      Reply
    • Morgan Wright says:
      December 30, 2015 at 1:10 pm

      Hey cj, if you think 2015 was warm, just wait to see 2016. There is no telling how much data tampering Gavin will do right before Trump fires him in January 2017

      Reply
    • Jason Calley says:
      December 30, 2015 at 2:07 pm

      It may be true that the charts indicate that 2015 is the warmest year ever. The problem that sceptics have with that, is that the actual surface thermometers and satellite measurements say that it is NOT the warmest ever.

      I would remind any readers that the chart is created by the same organization that claims unemployment is a healthy 5.0%, that the consumer price index is below 2% inflation, and that national debt is under control.

      By the way, slightly off topic (not too far) here is a good article re “journalists.” https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/12/james-ostrowski/never-trust-progressive-journalist/

      Reply
    • Karl W. Braun says:
      December 31, 2015 at 9:29 am

      The Japan Meteorological Agency essentially receives its data and methodology from the NOAA.

      Reply
      • AndyG55 says:
        December 31, 2015 at 10:23 am

        And from NCDC..

        They must know that this data is MASSIVELY corrupted.

        The very first thing any REAL SCIENTIST would do would be to check the authenticity of the data they are using.

        They must know that the NOAA/NCDC data is just a MASSIVE FABRICATION, totally unrelated to reality

        VERY BAD SCIENCE on their behalf.

        Reply
  5. xyzzy11 says:
    December 30, 2015 at 1:07 pm

    Not according to the (non-homogenized, non-altered) satellite data.

    Reply
    • Martin Smith says:
      December 30, 2015 at 1:24 pm

      There is no such thing as non-altered satellite data. The satellite data isn’t even temperature data.

      Reply
      • Morgan Wright says:
        December 30, 2015 at 1:49 pm

        Thermometer data isn’t even temperature data. It only measures the level of a “fluid” in a glass “bulb” (add sneering sound to voice here) which we only interpret to be a temperature.

        Reply
        • winnipegboy says:
          December 30, 2015 at 2:39 pm

          And our small minds are too feeble to read that simple instrument today. Recorded numbers will be changed ten years from now to correct for our inability to read a thermometer.

        • bleakhouses says:
          December 30, 2015 at 2:50 pm

          This is the new front; claim the satellite data is adjusted more than the surface data. I’ve encountered it several times/places over the past few months.

        • Jason Calley says:
          December 30, 2015 at 3:02 pm

          Funny… I remember when the satellites were being planned, the whole purpose was that they would provide more accurate data than the sparse and often ill-sited surface stations. Now that they are providing, uh, “inconvenient” data, they have suddenly ceased to be reliable. Funny…

        • Steve Case says:
          December 30, 2015 at 3:28 pm

          winnipegboy said at 2:39 pm
          … Recorded numbers will be changed ten years from now to correct for our inability to read a thermometer.

          Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

          Only ten years from now? The GISS data for January 1880 has been changed at least 27 times since 2005. If I had 100% of the monthly publications
          http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
          instead of a mere 70% I’m sure there would be a few more.

          Here are the changes to that date made just this year:

          Year Jan …
          1880 -29 …

          YYYY    MM    ?0.01°C
          2015        2        -34
          2015        3        -35
          2015        4        -34
          2015        6        -29
          2015        7        -30
          2015        11      -29

        • AndyG55 says:
          December 31, 2015 at 10:29 am

          The data for UAH USA compared to the only pristine surface data in the world is an almost EXACT TREND MATCH.

          The temperature data extraction methodology of the satellite is ABSOLUTELY VERIFIED.

      • Neal S says:
        December 30, 2015 at 3:58 pm

        Steve Case shows changes made to GISS data for January 1880 just in this year alone. I find that particularly damning and that should make it plain to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the GISS record that is now being reported is a work of fiction. The public as a whole may be stupid, but not all of us are THAT stupid.

        Reply
      • AndyG55 says:
        December 31, 2015 at 10:27 am

        AGAIN, your ignorance is brought to the fore.

        The data for UAH USA compared to the only pristine surface data in the world is an almost EXACT TREND MATCH.

        The temperature data extraction methodology of the satellite is ABSOLUTELY VARIFIED.

        There is no way you can get around this FACT. !

        And you know it.. yet you keep up your PATHETIC pretence.

        Reply
      • Gail Combs says:
        December 31, 2015 at 12:17 pm

        VALIDATED and VERIFIED SATELLITE DATA
        However NOAA refuses to give Congress and the public, who pays their salaries the information subpoenaed about their ever changing adjusted surface temperature estimates. A ‘product’ that does not deserve the name data.

        APPENDIX A. COMPARISON OF MSU AND RSS
        The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) [Christy and Norris, 2006] and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) (Mears and Wentz, 2005) provide two independent analyses of the same MSU data [1979-2007]. The MSU_LT anomalies used in this study represent the lower troposphere (LT) and are a weighted mean from the surface to a pressure of 350 hPa (mean altitude 2.5 km) [Spencer and Christy (1992)]. The importance of the MSU data sets is that all areas of the globe are sampled uniformly. A weakness is that the record does not begin until 1979.

        Randall and Herman [2008] report a detailed comparison of UAH and RSS in an effort to determine the causes of the discrepancies between the two data sets. They found that the discrepancies were associated with adjustments from one satellite to another and with diurnal corrections. Comparison with radiosonde data sets “… [i]ndicated that RSS’s method … of determining diurnal effects is likely overestimating the correction to the LT channel.” In other words, Randall and Herman state that the RSS methods lead to warm biases and thus the UAH data set is likely better. In particular, they state that the largest discrepancies [RSS larger than UAH] in the LT channel are centered on 1993 in both the global and tropical data. There are also other smaller discrepancies.

        Christy and Norris [2006] and Christy et al. [2007] provide additional evidence that UAH is preferred over RSS. Their conclusions are based upon (a) An examination of specific time periods (b) A study of the inter-relationships between MSU bulk layer temperatures and (c) In a comparison with a uniform dataset of U.S. radiosondes, RSS tropospheric temperatures revealed a significant upward shift of about 0.1 K in the early 1990s. Further comparisons with tropical radiosondes and surface temperature datasets indicated the same result, that in comparison with all others, RSS displayed a relative positive shift of 0.07 to 0.13 K. In absolute terms, RSS was the only tropical tropospheric dataset which indicated 3-year average temperatures were significantly warmer after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo than before. Finally, in a test of inter-layer consistency (i.e. the relationship between temperatures of satellite products measuring different vertical layers), RSS data were outside the statistical estimates calculated by radiosonde measurements (Christy et al. 2007).

        In the text of this paper we showed that the anomalies in the tropics are strongly correlated with ENSO and since ENSO effects obviously have no break-points or diurnal corrections, then the data set that best processed the break points and diurnal corrections would have the highest correlation with nino3.4. UAH had the larger R2. Can we determine where the differences between UAH and RSS are and their magnitude? Since RSS has the more positive linear trend, published evidence shows that there is a “jump” between the two data sets sometime during the early-mid 1990s.

        This possibility was tested on the tropical data. In particular, the total time-segment was divided into an early period and a late period separated by a short time-segment that was removed. Fig. A1 shows a plot of RSS vs. UAH. The early time-segment are the open diamonds and the late time-segment are the closed diamonds. The beginning and end of the removed segment were varied to give the largest coefficient of determination, R2, while keeping the slope near 1.This procedure leads to a unique removed-segment from mid-92 to mid-94 (see Christy and Norris [2006], Christy et al. [2007] and Randal and Hermann [2008] for more detail). The jump was 0.136oK.
        This and other results are tabulated in Table A1.

        By these tests we view UAH as the better data set.
        http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy_pubs.html

        Of course since Marty the Troll has no idea what VALIDATED and VERIFIED means or what a peer reviewed paper is, he will say this information should be discarded.

        Reply
  6. eliza says:
    December 30, 2015 at 2:55 pm

    Hey Martin so Radiosonde balloon from FOUR data sets aint reliable either hahah
    http://www.globalwarming.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png

    Reply
  7. pinroot says:
    December 30, 2015 at 4:44 pm

    Martin says :
    Sure. I think this was the first guy to publish on the greenhouse effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect

    Are you citing Wikipedia as ‘peer reviewed?”

    And BTW, if you want to cite Arrhenius, don’t forget to mention that he said that global warming would be a good thing. You can’t have one without the other. 🙂

    Reply
    • Gail Combs says:
      December 30, 2015 at 5:28 pm

      Pinroot,
      Given several of the comments by M.Winston Smith lately, I do not think he even KNOWS what the words ‘peer reviewed’ actually means!

      After all he calls the peer reviewed papers I have posted ‘Sciency stuff’ and Bloviating…

      Well I will admit a lot of scientists bloviate. Dr. J. Scott Armstrong (Penn State) even wrote a paper “Bafflegab Pays,”

      Reply
      • gator69 says:
        December 30, 2015 at 6:23 pm

        A new paper in Nature finds scientists have become carnival barkers…

        But Vinkers and his colleagues think that the trend highlights a problem. “If everything is ‘robust’ and ‘novel’”, says Vinkers, then there is no distinction between the qualities of findings. “In that case, words used to describe scientific results are no longer driven by the content but by marketability.”

        A BBC story here says the use of the word “robust” has gone up 15000% They write:

        Despite working with facts, figures and empirical evidence, the world of science appears to have a growing addiction to hyperbole. Researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands looked at four decades worth of medical and scientific publications, and found a significant upwards trend of positive words. We’ve all heard of those ”ground-breaking” studies or ”innovative” research projects. Dr Christiaan Vinkers – a psychiatrist at the Rudolf Magnus brain centre – was the main author of another ”very robust” report.

        Reply

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