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...

The image below is a fake image. It's reported to be an image of a rainbow that was posted on the David Attenborough Club  (apparently maintained by Hasan Jasim) and attributed to Lloyd Ferraro . According to at least one source, Lloyd Ferraro is a pilot who took this image at 30,000 ft while flying a plane. "According to Ferraro, he was flying over the Pacific Ocean when he spotted the rainbow and decided to capture the moment on camera. The resulting photograph has since gone viral, captivating people around the world with its beauty and rarity." However, there is no doubt that the rainbow in this image is photoshopped or (perhaps more likely) AI-generated .  There are at least three ways we know this is the case. First, we see rainbows when looking in the direction of our shadow. It's not possible to see a rainbow when the sun is in front of you, as is basically the case in this image. Second, the primary red ring of a rainbow forms at a 42° angle, relative to yo...

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...