Wood Romances

One of the more fun aspects of debunking pseudoscience claims is finding humorous ways to replicate the logical flaws of crank theories. The crank theories of Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) are among my favorites, and I just found what I think is a fun illustration of how their thinking can be so wrong while superficially looking convincing to the unskeptical. Simply stated, NZ took some data points about several rocky planets and moons and performed a curve fit for "Relative ATE" as a function of mean surface atmospheric pressure. It looks like this. Since they got the curve fit to work without including the impact of greenhouse gases (GHGs), their conclusion is that atmospheric composition and concentrations of GHGs are irrelevant to the global mean surface temperature on any rocky planet or moon. They then developed a model that reports to be able to predict the mean surface temperature of any rocky planet or moon with just three data points: TSI, albedo, and mean surface atmosp...

Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) published a "paper" ( this link downloads a pdf) in 2011 that claims to be a "unified theory of climate" (UTC). In it they offer the nuts and bolts of what they think is an alternative explanation for the greenhouse effect (GHE). Instead of greenhouse gases (GHGs), they argue that long-term climate changes are caused by changes in atmospheric mass that change atmospheric pressure. The change in pressure changes global temperature via the ideal gas law (IGL). This concept has already been debunked ; there's nothing resembling a working theory here. They seem very confused about the fact that it's work applied to compressing a gas that increases its temperature (and pressure); at hydrostatic equilibrium, pressure doesn't do work, and so pressure doesn't cause temperature to increase. If pressure could perform work to increase temperature, it would violate conservation of energy. Pressure changes as a result of the work that inc...

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ~  Charles Bukowski  ~ Perhaps we've all encountered individuals who seem to be simultaneously overconfident and incompetent in a subject matter in which they have strong beliefs. When this occurs, many of us become convinced that these people are suffering from what has been popularly coined the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." I'd like to challenge this notion. I think this oversimplifies a complex problem we're experiencing today. We don't gain, learn and process information like we used to, and the information we see is frequently curated  by our own biases and social media, and both can cause us to become ideologically entrenched in a condition in which we accept what is false and reject what challenges us. The Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a Different Curve from the Popularized Dunning-Kruger Effect Dunning-Kruger Effect The actual effect...

JWST Image from NASA Like many, I've been dazzled by the early images of the the James Web Space Telescope (JWST), and I've loved seeing not only the images but the memes poking fun at how popular these images have become. I've found these images beautiful, inspiring and even mind blowing. The scientists who are examining these images have had similar reactions, and from what I can tell, early images and reports from the JWST may have far reaching implications for how scientists understand the universe, especially how the earliest galaxies formed. But on August 11, 2022, Eric Lerner wrote an opinion piece for iai news suggesting that these images from the JWST basically prove that the Big Bang didn't happen. When someone shared this on Facebook, I was very interested in this, since as I understand it, this would be a major paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe as expanding. I read the article to be told that many of the surprising images from the JWST we...

Andy May recently wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner[1] that I think warrants a rebuttal. If you haven't heard of him, Mr. May is a petroleum geologist who somewhat inflates his credentials when sharing his opinions to obscure his conflict of interest with climate science. He claims that he is a "petrophysicist" (he's a petroleum geologist with a BS in Geology), a "paleoclimate expert" (which he demonstrably isn't, see below), and a member of the CO2 Coalition (which he is). But he's popular in the contrarian blogosphere, so I think there are some things we can learn from interacting with his claims here that can yield some helpful insights into climate science and the scientific method. In this opinion piece, Andy May is claiming that Karl Popper's philosophy of science should cause us to see that climate change is unfalsifiable and therefore pseudoscience. Well, I think that's what he's trying to say but he kind of blunde...