Maybe you’ve seen websites like ifixit which take new Apple computers to pieces, and then complain how hard they are to take to pieces.
Today, let us take to pieces the bollocks masquerading as science in my previous post. I can tell you the good news already: No complaining about how hard it was will be required. I do recommend grabbing an ice cream to lick before reading on.
The bollocks is question today is entitled: No Experimental Evidence for the Significant Anthropogenic Climate Change, and can be found on the arXiv preprint server.
For non-scientists, let me briefly explain what arXiv is. arXiv is a place scientists can send unreviewed articles and make them public. arXiv is not a scientific journal. Having an article on arXiv is totally independent of scientific credibility or acceptance by peers. All arXiv does is “get your stuff out there”, which can be useful to show you solved a problem first. It is also a way to post a superficially different version of an article published in a closed-access scientific journal, without causing legal issues. Thus, articles on arXiv may have been peer reviewed but, again, this is not always the case. It is definitely not the case today.
Now, we can continue and move on—past the terrible grammar of the article’s title—to the authors. As a scientist, what jumps out first is how the authors do not put their academic affiliation on the first page. This fails sniff test n° 1, and we haven’t even gotten to the article’s content. The two authors are affiliated with a real university, the University of Turku in Finland, yet hide this away at the end of the article, underneath the references. This proves nothing, but is totally weird, dude.
When it comes to the “science” content of possibly crazy stuff, the website climatefeedback.org is a good place to see what scientists think when it comes through. Its response to this article can be found here. For instance, the scientist Stephen Po-Chedley had this to say:
The main claim is based on a correlation: that as the Earth warms, low clouds disappear. The authors’ narrative is that low clouds are decreasing due to some natural cause (no mechanism provided by the authors) and the disappearance of low clouds then results in surface warming.
If you’re not a scientist and/or it’s still a bit unclear, he then adds:
This is akin to claiming that increased ice cream sales leads to warmer temperatures.
Life would be so much simpler if correlation meant causation! Damn you Science!
Yet another red flag is that the authors don’t say where their data comes from, and do not provide it. Red alert! Red alert!
What is bounteously clear is that Jyrki Kauppinen and Pekka Malmi have no interest in performing actual science. Their motivations are therefore murky. If I find out any more about them, I’ll put it in a later post.