Jennifer Marohasy

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How Scientific Ideas Become Fashionable (Part 2)

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MICHAEL Crichton wrote the Oscar-winning science fiction adventure Jurassic Park. But screen writing was not his first career, he studied medicine at Harvard, and later in life became very concerned about environmentalism and science, and the difficulty of sorting fact from fiction. In a lecture to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 2003 he said:

“The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.”

For sure every day we are bombarded with information from the internet, radio and television and making sense of it can be difficult.

Scientists are meant to know the difference between fact and fiction and as a first check of the reliability of a source of information they will often ask if it has been “peer-reviewed”. Peer-review means that research findings are conducted and presented to a standard that other scientists working within that field consider acceptable. This is normally achieved through publication in a scientific journal and involves the editor of the journal asking for comment on the validity, significance and originality of the work from other scientists before publication. In short, the system of peer-review means scientific research is subject to independent scrutiny but it doesn’t guarantee the truth of the research finding.

In theory rebuttals play an equal or more important role than peer review in guaranteeing the integrity of science. By rebuttals I mean articles, also in peer-reviewed journals, that show by means of contrary evidence and argument, that an earlier claim was false. By pointing out flaws in scientific papers that have passed peer-review, rebuttals, at least theoretically, enable scientific research programs to self-correct. But in reality most rebuttals are totally ignored and so fashionable ideas often persist even when they have been disproven.

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At the Top of Noosa Hill

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THIS afternoon I walked up to the top of Noosa Hill, in Noosa National Park.

I thought all the koalas had disappeared from the park, but there is at least one still there.

And the native Iris, Patersonia sp.glabrata , were flowering.

But what is this structure on top of the hill – that I am photographed sitting on?

How the Oceans Get Warm? (Rephrased)

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ACCORDING to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the oceans are warming [1]. But the IPCC does not explain the underlying physical mechanism, the IPCC does not explain from first principles how the oceans warm.

In 2000, in a short article for Science and Technology Magazine, a respected oceanographer, the late Robert E. Stevenson wrote that the popular scientific consensus that greenhouses gases were causing the oceans to warm was incorrect because infrared radiation from greenhouse gases heats only the top few millimetres of the ocean and as a consequence is soon dissipated by evaporation [2]. According to Dr Stevenson, it is only the sun that can warm the oceans.

Indeed incoming solar radiation in the visible spectrum* is mostly short-wave radiation and it is generally accepted, including by those who swim in the ocean, that this radiation can penetrate a significant distance into the water column and is stored as heat.

Physicists that specialize in quantifying heat transfer will generally concur with Dr Stevenson. They explain that evaporation, conduction and long-wave infrared radiation (for example from greenhouse gases) are all surface heat transfer effects. That is, they only heat or cool at the very surface of the water.

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Climate4You Update

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Dear Jennifer,

Please find below a link which will take you directly to a monthly newsletter (ca. 1.5 MB) with global meteorological information updated to June 2012:
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_June_2012.pdf

All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius.

Previous issues (since March 2009) of this newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available for download on http://www.climate4you.com/

All the best, yours sincerely,
Ole Humlum
Professor of Physical Geography
University of Oslo, Norway

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Facebook, And

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I’ve a Facebook account and I’ve started posting information there that is not about the natural environment, but that I think is important.  A reader of this blog, Neville, sent me a link to a podcast of Alan Jones on 2GB talking this morning about Julia Gillard and her involvement with the AWU.   Alan Jones can go on a bit, but this morning he was unusually specific and focused.

You can hear the podcast at the 2GB website or via my Facebook page.  Following is a simple screenshot of the post at Facebook.  To link directly to my Facebook page look for the photograph of me on the RHS column of this blog home page and click on for the link.  Cheers,

How the Oceans Get Warm: Robert E. Stevenson

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THERE are only ever a small number of scientists who can explain a phenomenon from first principles and these experts will often speak in jargon that is unintelligible[1]. But every so often one comes across a real expert who appears to not only have a deep understanding of a subject area, but can also write with clarity on that subject.

The oceanographer the late Robert E. Stevenson [2] wrote a short article for Science and Technology Magazine in 2000 disputing the popular consensus on how the oceans warm [3]. In the following extract from ‘Yes, the Ocean has Warmed; No, It’s Not Global Warming’, Dr Stevenson claims that:

1. Sunlight directly heats the ocean to a certain depth, up to 100 metres;
2. The ocean heat balance is maintained by heat loss to the atmosphere, not to the deep ocean; and
3. Infrared radiation from greenhouse gases heats only the top few millimetres of the ocean and as a consequence is soon dissipated by evaporation.
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