There is an intriguing ‘meeting of the minds’ going on over at Tallbloke’s blog right now. The topic that sparked it was an old controversy from the 19th century, about whether an air column confined to a container would be cooler at the top than at the bottom (because of gravitation).
The fellow who introduced the topic is William Gilbert. He is also the author of a paper which appeared in 2010 in the journal Energy & Environment, about lapse rates. Gilbert studied radiosonde data for hot, wet days in the tropics, and found that the latent heat introduced into the atmosphere on such days does not get used exclusively for heating the air. Instead, as the air gets wetter, an increasing proportion of the total energy goes to PdV work, that is, to making the air expand and rise.
His conclusion was twofold: 1) you cannot make the air at sea level hotter, and cause the lapse rate to fall, at the same time; 2) water vapor feedback overall is negative.
There are still some kinks to be ironed out, as I don’t fully understand William’s work yet, and he doesn’t fully understand mine. But we agree broadly on a number of things, among them the importance of Ferenc Miskolczi’s work on radiation. I think this might be a breakthrough.
Despite many distractions and challenges, I have completed making planned cuts to the manuscript of The Decline Effect. (Those who might worry that I’m removing something essential should see my previous post: I’m just going to settle for three graphs on a given topic instead of four.)
Now I’m working on building the final index. It’s …
Read More →
In today’s National Post, there is an interesting piece by Joseph Brean on the subject of spurious statistical correlations in science. It touches briefly on the decline effect, but not in a way that I find entirely encouraging.
Brean cites several papers, including one by Young and Karr on problems with irreproducible results, in the journal …
Read More →
The other day I reported that fellow blogger Tallbloke had had two computers and a router seized by the Norfolk police, as part of the investigation into the Climategate e-mail hack. He was not named as a suspect, just a tenuous link in an evidence chain. There was intense concern among skeptic bloggers over the …
Read More →
A few weeks ago, my ‘Pot Lid’ paper got a favorable mention on Tallbloke’s climate blog. Today I find that acting on a request from the U.S. Department of Justice, a platoon of British policemen descended on Tallbloke’s house and seized several computers.
This isn’t about ‘Pot Lid’. There was another big dump of 5,000 or …
Read More →
There are a number of good articles on the ongoing problems with developing new drugs, but this one leaped out at me. In particular, check out the logarithmic decline in new drugs brought into use per billion $ of research and development funding:
There are some facts not shown in the graph that need to be …
Read More →
This post is something of an experiment.
As I said in a previous post, I’m interested in knowing just how big the community of expert audit software users is, and where to find them. So I’ve been doing a variety of searches, including setting Google to search only on blogs — that is, on WordPress and …
Read More →
I have added a page entitled ‘Bayes and decline‘ that will deal with the more technical details of the decline effect. In particular, it will explain why I regard the phenomenon as only explainable using a Bayesian approach.
I’ve also updated the Downloads page by adding an Excel spreadsheet with some probability experiments I ran several …
Read More →
There is a new blog entry by Jonah Lehrer, “How Does Prozac Work?” (Nov 17, find it here) that touches on the decline effect in pharmaceuticals. It’s not good news. And in a strange way it is stressing me out personally.
First Lehrer discusses the failure of a promising new anti-depressant drug, designated GSK372475, from Glaxo. …
Read More →
The Conscious Media Network has released an interview with Jonathan Schooler (here) about his work on the decline effect.
Be warned, the CMN is pretty eclectic and ‘alternative’. They feature interviews about David Icke, conspiracies, UFO’s, and natural foods, among other things. The interviewer’s perspective on the decline effect, not surprisingly, was that it is a …
Read More →