Month: January 2019

Apocalypse When?

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(6): November 2018

The date certain of the climate apocalypse when Manhattan will be underwater, predicted for 40 years, keeps getting pushed back from Al Gore’s early threats, but this just means a “bit more breathing space” for the world to meet its CO2 reduction goals.

It’s a “matter of (half) degrees,” writes Nature on Oct 11. “The latest IPCC assessment on a 1.5 °C increase makes it clear that there is no safe level of global warming.” A 1.5 °C increase could cause the loss of 70%-90% of our coral reefs; with 2 °C, they could disappear almost entirely. “Projections based on current emissions commitments suggest that the world is on track for around 3 °C of warming by the end of the century” (ibid.)

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says CO2 emissions must peak now and fall rapidly to avert catastrophe. Models show that to achieve the goal of a less-than-2.7 °F  (1.5 °C) increase, the world must stop all fossil fuel use in 4 years. If all countries met their Paris targets, we’d be 1% of the way there (Bjorn Lomborg, WSJ 10/9/18). The number of countries even aiming to reach their Paris targets is 16/197 (6%) (TWTW 11/3/18, sepp.org).

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Scientific Regression

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(5): September 2018

Everyone claims to be in favor of “data-based,” “evidence-based,” or “science-based” policy; demands “peer review”; and disdains “pseudoscience,” “fringe opinions,” and “outliers.”

But in these days when our society is so heavily dependent on science, “the problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t,” writes software engineer William A. Wilson (First Things, May 2016, https://tinyurl.com/zzlbevc).

The original study by the Open Science Collaboration (OSC) showed that an astonishing 65% of 100 published psychology experiments failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.

An unspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry is that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer found that in more than 75% of 67 recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, data published in prestigious journals did not match up with their attempts to replicate it.

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