On the 5th of March, Fox News released an article on their blog where they announced that Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist who works at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre, thinks he has found evidence for extraterrestrial life. And since then I’ve seen this crop up on more and more places on the internet.
Now what Hoover found were structures inside a rare type of meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite, it contains structures that have a resemblance with certain terrestrial bacteria we know. But it’s extremely difficult to rule out contamination of the sample. And as such it is wise to wait to get independent confirmation that this indeed might be remains of extraterrestrial life. Especially as Hoover has already made similar claims that have not been confirmed.
There is however one part that raises really big red flags with this find, and that is where it was published, in the Journal of Cosmology. A journal where they have the rule, I kid you not, all articles must avoid jargon. Which is quite an odd rule for a journal to have, and as you can imagine not a single respectable journal has that rule.
If I wasn’t very sceptical and allergic to bad science I probably wouldn’t be the tech guy for SkepticTV. And yesterday a story about the discovery of extraterrestrial life hit the news that raised a lot of red flags.
Yesterday, the 5th of March, Fox News released an article on their blog where they announced that Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre, thinks he has found evidence for extraterrestrial life. And since Fox News published this article I’ve seen this crop up on more and more places on the internet.
If I wasn’t very sceptical and allergic to bad science I probably wouldn’t be the tech guy for SkepticTV. And yesterday a story about the discovery of extraterrestrial life hit the news that raised a lot of red flags.
“Sceptics” often cite ice core data to make a point along the lines that current warming isn’t a problem and is within normal climate variability. And often they cite research papers and data to prove this point. However almost every single time they display temperature records out of context, and more often than not come to entirely different conclusions than…
A reasonably large portion of the global warming sceptics regard Lord Monckton quite highly. And his arguments are often used as definite proof that CO2 caused global warming is one big hoax. Because of this he’s often given a soap box at the blog Watts Up With That to make his case. Even Alex Jones is quite fond of him, and…
Seriously? You post an excerpt from a column where one of the arguments is “Even the weather has turned against them, showing that all the computer models based on the assumption that rising CO2 means rising temperatures have got it wrong.”. Which can be paraphrased as it’s snowing outside so global warming is not happening… Cold spells can happen, even when the planet is warming up.
However, it’s again someone who’s work is being used which also says that second hand smoking and asbestos don’t cause cancer. And even has been critical on the theory of evolution saying “rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions”.
Continue reading Leaving a Comment on WattsUpWithThat
I probably shouldn’t for the sake of my blood pressure, but I do keep taps on what people on the other side of the debate are saying, especially the more vocal ones. I use it to keep myself appraised of any contrary evidence and queues me on possible cases where a critical look at evidence might be needed.
But I have to say this, most of the time what is being put out by the “sceptics” is severely lacking. Errors and misrepresentation galore, a lot of it being unintentional as climatology is a difficult subject. But often it has its root in what, to me, looks like intentional misdirection and butchering of the science.
And the latest butchering was promoted in a post on the blog Watts Up With That, a website that has a reputation of misdirection and scientific errors:
Continue reading How BBC Warmists Abuse The Science – A Response