Watt's Up With That?

My favorite web site has become Watt's Up With That, a place that skewers the anthropomorphic global warming crowd several times a day.  One of today's follies is a forecast by the UK National Trust that England will be tropical within 90 years with palm trees and tropical fruit.  The Arctic will see temperature increases of 16 degrees Centigrade!

Never mind that the temperature of England has increased only 0.5 degrees C in the last 80 years and that is likely be the effect of Urban Heat Island encroachment on existing weather stations.  We have no idea about the arctic trend because there are no weather stations north of 80 degrees north latitude.  The Goddard estimates of arctic temperatures are based on measurements up to 1200 kilometers (750 miles) away.

Al Gore should be proud.  And rich.

Yet another web annoyance

It was bad enough when pop-ups began to dominate web advertising, but at least we had a counter weapon in the browsers themselves, as well as add-ins like Ad-Block. Pop-unders seem to remain unaffected, but they are no annoyance until you close the browser.

And then there are those annoying roll-over JavaScript pop-ups.  I haven't found a solution to that except to disable JavaScript and hope to be properly notified where it needs to be re-enabled.  But it's not, in the case of this blog's editing software.  I'm sure it causes other problems.

The best solution seems to be to use Readibility.  It's free and cleans up 99% of the garbage by reformatting the entire page, presenting only the text portion.   It's especially useful to get rid of flashing advertisements.  However, it also tends to ignore the comments on an article, if any.

Now a new, insidious menace is creeping in. Even major web sites like Time Magazine are including third-party ads to which they link by way of including them in their own web site. But those third-party servers are frequently down or perhaps overloaded.   Either way, well after the web page is loaded you get an error pop-up saying they cannot contact junksite.com (or whatever.) Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

What a bunch of amateurs!

Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels

A paper by Henry H. Bauer back in 2004 is worth reposting.  For that matter, people with a serious interest in what's going on in science should be aware of the Society for Scientific Exploration and their quarterly periodical Fringe Science where they now publish scientific mysteries and the more speculative articles that previously appeared in their main journal.  For example, there is some scientific evidence that the rate of natural radioactive decay varies cyclically ever so slightly on an annual basis. The speculation is that solar-generated neutrinos may be the source of the phenomenon. There's some really weird stuff in that journal!

Anyway, back to the paper titled Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels.

Abstract—Minority views on technical issues are largely absent from the public arena. Increasingly corporate organization of science has led to knowledge monopolies, which, with the unwitting help of uncritical mass media, effect a kind of censorship. Since corporate scientific organizations also control the funding of research, by denying funds for unorthodox work they function as research cartels as well as knowledge monopolies. A related aspect of contemporary science is commercialization.
Science is now altogether different from the traditional disinterested search, by self-motivated individuals, to understand the world. What national and international organizations publicly proclaim as scientific information is not safeguarded by the traditional process of peer review. Society needs new arrangements to ensure that public information about matters of science will be trustworthy.
Actions to curb the power of the monopolies and cartels can be conceived: mandatory funding of contrarian research, mandatory presence of contrarian opinion on advisory panels, a Science Court to adjudicate technical controversies, ombudsman offices at a variety of organizations. Most sorely needed is vigorously investigative science journalism.

His comments are especially relevant today when huge, untethered intergovernmental monopolies like the IPCC seem to be able to say what they please in order to influence public policy and there is no investigative scientific journalism in the main-stream media.  If it were not for the newly emerging "blogosphere," few would have any reason to doubt Al Gore.