Monday
Nov082010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Mann cannot live by science alone
Nov 8, 2010 Climate: Mann Michael Mann is rapidly developing a full-time career as a media personality. After the WaPo article, the BAS article and the Britannia Blog interview comes an appearance at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing meeting.
After running through the evidence supporting human-caused climate change, Mann concluded that “there’s not just a hockey stick — there’s a hockey league.” Some scientific uncertainties do remain about climate change, such as the precise effects of clouds in a changing climate. “There are legitimate uncertainties,” Mann said, “but unfortunately the public discourse right now is so far from scientific discourse.”
Reader Comments (60)
j ferguson
Ah, true they were into cold things, if you consider room temperature cold. But they are rarely talked about today -- there was no mojo in their fusion much as there is no mojo in Mightly Mad Mike's hockey stick. He will be history as well, that is the parallel.
PS. You are dating yourself. Are you a crotchety old curmudgeon like me as well? :)
I once worked with Martin Fleischmann. Cold fusion exists but was buried by the military for 17 years or so as they tried to see if it was a new fusion trigger. A recent paper published by the Atlanta Naval Research Lab proved the exact neutron energy for fusion There's also Japanese work showing transmuted trace metals in Palladium have the isotopic ratio of the progenitor.
It's OK. He's following along with the Obama approach and will end with the predictable result - the more people see and hear the more they have to think about what he's saying. For the AGW group, just like with Obama, the less they like, the less they "believe" and the more discredited they become.
It'd be good to have them on every hour. Just like Baghdad Bob.
Don P
"PS. You are dating yourself. Are you a crotchety old curmudgeon like me as well? :)"
Not sure about the "old." Is 68 old?
I can clearly remember thinking that the F&P "discovery" would change everything. I think it took about a week for it to be convincingly shot down - Feynmann among the dissenters.
I think F&P were honest. I'm not sure about Mann. But then the recent Mannifestations seem to me to point to madness. Or is it accumulator overload?
I once spoke to a proper nuclear physicist about F&P and, like Feynman, he told me it's impossible. However, you can never truly rely on physicists because they always over-simplify problems: us engineers don't.
You see, F&P's experiment wasn't done properly. They used a constant current power source and when you have D2 covering the surface, local voltage can change considerably as bubble patterns change. So, I suspect they did not have a steady state. Under such conditions, electrochemistry can behave in a way undreamed of by physicists, who usually give such problems a wide berth.
Suddenly shut down local ionic current and the Helmholtz double layer collapses, also the ordered water molecules around cations. You can get local electric fields over a nanosecond of up to 2.10^9 V/cm over the Debye length of the electrolyte as you get local induced charge on the cathodei. That's sufficient to start fusion.
F&P found evidence of surface rearrangement consistent with highly energetic reactions.
From here:
This is defending Mann against Cuccinelli's efforts
He's gonna blow!
http://www.break.com/pictures/hes-gonna-blow756753.html
What are "legitimate uncertainties" anyway?
Perhaps a decline in tree ring growth rates concurrent with a rise in temperature creates an illegitimate uncertainty that must be hidden?
j ferguson
Age is in the mind of the beholder, I guess. We are about the same age. :)
Perhaps I am merely using it as an excuse to snarl at trolls.
I, too, was very interested in F&P's work, and even considered buying palladium or whatever catalyst they used because it was sure to go sky high. Fortunately, I didn't.
And I agree that they were honest, unlike Mann, who I consider a [snip]
Alexander Davidson
Thank you for the explanation. It is the first I have seen of it. Now, can you explain Poly Water?
It was bad data.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKPhemqsynU