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After reading about the likely relaunch of “Patterns Recognition in Physics” on Jo Nova (which I thoroughly endorse) I was reminded that there is a glaring hole in the list of journals, which is stopping many good papers from getting published, not because they are not first class, but because there is a “Not Invented Here” attitude in much of academia which unfortunately has resulted in much work from non-academics being sidelined, ignored and only ever seeing the light of day on blogs.
Many have tried to get work published, many have failed or just given up because as the episode of Patterns Recognition in Physics shows, even academics can’t get certain science published if it falls foul of the “Not Wanted Here” attitude of many academics.
I do not think the solution is to continue flogging the dead horse and try to get non-academic work into academic journals, instead I think the solution is to take the bull by the horns and do a better job ourselves.
So, I’m floating the idea of a new journal which can be seen in embryonic form at:
TheCitizenScientist.org
If we go ahead we will need reviewers and articles. There are so many excellent articles already on-line which would only need tidying up and reformatting to a more “formal” style (e.g. references). Reviewers could be a bigger problem – any volunteers?
That’s the basic idea.
What do you think? Is it worth trying and if so, can you suggest articles that should go in?

According to a new translated Cuneiform tablet, Noah’s Ark was round. Reading the Daily Mail Comments I read :
Cardiff supporter:

Noah was a farmer who built a larger version of the locally used coracle. An earlier earth quake warned him that the natural dam holding back the Mediterranean would likely breach and flood the lower land [I assume this is the Black Sea Hypothesis]. As the story says a large round boat was built, similar to a round inflatable lifeboat but instead of rubber rings reeds. As Thor Heyerdahl created in his second adventure Ra 2 large reed like ropes bound together. He took 2 of each of his farming stock and his family and survived to make history. What’s the problem?

The problem is that the very fact that this is such a well known story after three and half thousand years, suggests that there is something unique about this story that rings a particular resonance with people. That strongly suggests the story will have been moulded over time to represent what we want to hear rather than any actual historical event. Continue reading →

There’s a post on Climate Etc. “Death of Expertise“. I’m not  commenting on this directly. Instead, I have a very simple question: what is an expert?
Two scales come to mind, the first is that in any given subject the probability that a person will be the source of the answer is greater than some arbitrary value. That value might be text books or google. The other scale is that in any given subject, the probability that the answer given by the expert is right is greater than some arbitrary value.
So, let us examine an uncontroversial subject on which there is a wide spread consensus 🙂 boiling eggs Continue reading →

In Eleven – End of the Last Ice age we saw the sequence of events that led to the termination of the most recent ice age – Termination I.
The date of this event, the time when the termination began, was about 17.5-18.0 kyrs ago (note 1). We also saw that “rising solar insolation” couldn’t explain this. By way of illustration I produced some plots in Pop Quiz: End of An Ice Age – all from the last 100 yrs and asked readers to identify which one coincided with Termination I.
But this simple graph of insolation at 65ºN on July 1st summarizes the problem for the”classic version” (see Part Six – “Hypotheses Abound”) of the “Milankovitch theory” – in simple terms, if solar insolation at 18 kyrs ago caused the ice age to end, why didn’t the same or higher insolation at 100 kyrs, 80 kyrs, or from 60-30 kyrs cause the last ice age to end earlier:

Figure 1 
And for a more visual demonstration of solar insolation changes in time, take a look at the Hövmoller plots in the comments of Part Eleven.
The other problem for the Milankovitch theory of ice age termination is the fact that southern hemisphere temperatures rose in advance of global temperatures. So the South led the globe out of the ice age. This is hard to explain if the cause of the last termination was melting northern hemisphere ice sheets. Take a look at Eleven – End of the Last Ice age.
Now we’ve quickly reviewed Termination I, let’s take a look at Termination II. This is the end of the penultimate ice age.
The traditional Milankovitch theory says that peak high latitude solar insolation around 127 kyrs BP was the trigger for the massive deglaciation that ended that earlier ice age.
The well-known SPECMAP dating of sea-level/ice-volume vs time has Termination II at 128 ± 3 kyrs BP. All is good.
Or is it?
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After a “And Then There’s Physics” article exchange about the “pause”, I got to thinking where I might find “the missing heat” – or as politicians would put it “the economy’s growing – it’s just we can’t see it”. In other words, I don’t hold much to hocus pocus science and post factum certainties that “it has been warming – we just can’t see it”.
But even so, I was thinking about where the missing heat could go, mainly as it’s also the potential cause of natural climate variation, and that does interest me.
Eventually I realised a potential solution, and working through the figures came up with about 2C as the scale of possible change with about 0.2C as a conservative figure on how much I might expect to have seen recent global temperature change.
So am I going to say? No! Continue reading →