The pond has been yearning for a Lloydie from the Amazon piece for ever so long, and at last one landed and the pond caught it ...
Lloydie has been somewhat idle, some might even say slack.
Back on January 19th he had his first run for the year with Scientist Mick O'Leary's university role queried after judge's excoriation, which was an EXCLUSIVE, but which had a Noah Yim help him with the leg work.
Then you had to go way back to December 15th last year to cop Wishful rhetoric on fossil fuels' exit hard to COP ...
Now at last, there's a chance for a full quid Lloydie, and the pond's only bitter regret is that it has to be shoved into a late arvo holiday weekend special ...
Of course that joke about ideology tainting scientific endeavour is a great belly laugh for devotees of the lizard Oz, but for those who came in late, the pond should note that the tale of BOM's weather forecasts and rainfall estimates is actually a dog whistle to those true believers, who think that the BOM's corrupt data has produced the greatest hoax known to personkind .. deviant, devious climate science ... yes, BOM has betrayed the world by getting its numbers and its forecasts wrong. Who knew that BOM wielded such world-wide influence, but Lloydie and his team know ...
Meanwhile, there's going to be lots more dog whistles in what follows, including IPA notes and much windy talk of wind ...
This is the way it works. Find a likely suspect, and you can put all climate science on trial ... and when that gets tiring, you can fill up space with huge snaps ...
Indeed, indeed, and it goes without saying that Lloydie himself is an expert witness of the first water.
You see? Lloydie has travelled extensively, and to extraordinary wild places, and that's all you need to become an expert on experts at the lizard Oz, and better still, a much travelled expert on climate science ...
But of course an expert on experts will consult expert experts ... come on down Riddster of the IPA for a few sage words ...
What's that you say, Lloydie didn't save the Amazon ...
Pish posh, that's where BOM getting its numbers wrong will lead you ... nonsensical blather about a supercharged climate crisis, when we all know it's just a set of fraudulent data errors ...
Fear not, now that he's back, the pond has every confidence that Lloydie of the Amazon will keep working tirelessly for what's right, what's right being according to Jenny and the Riddster of the IPA, and doing down wind farms and the BOM mob, and so to a final rousing gobbet ...
Here's hoping they call Lloydie of the Amazon, expert on experts, expert on climate science, expert on wind farms, expert on BOM, and with the best experts on experts on call to help him hone his expertise...
Meanwhile, just to prove there's nowhere safe, the pond stumbled across this weekend essay in The New Yorker, The Future of Academic Freedom, by Jeannie Suk Gersen (possible paywall).
It was the usual, if somewhat disguised, blather about cancel culture, but the pond choked on its avocado and toast when the pond came to this paragraph:
In 2021, Carole Hooven, a longtime Harvard lecturer on human evolutionary biology who wrote a well-reviewed book about testosterone, stated in a Fox News interview, “The facts are that there are in fact two sexes . . . male and female, and those sexes are designated by the kind of gametes we produce.” She added that “understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” and that we can “respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.” The director of her department’s Diversity and Inclusion task force, a graduate student, denounced Hooven’s remarks, in a tweet, as “transphobic and harmful.” A cascade of shunning and condemnation ensued, including a petition, authored by graduate students, which implied that Hooven was a threat to student safety. Graduate students also refused to serve as teaching assistants for her previously popular course on hormones, making it difficult for her to keep teaching it. Hooven found it untenable to remain in her job, and she retired from the department.
Leaving aside a discussion of gender dysphoria, the facts are that Hooven's remarks were profoundly ignorant, and she deserved to retire.
Things have moved along a little, as The New Yorker's fact checkers could easily have reminded their readers, perhaps by referencing Claire Ainsworth's piece in Scientific American, 22nd October 2018 Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic:
As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.
A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.
When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.
These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.
“The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. “And that's often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.”
And so on ... you could google stories about testosterone levels in African female athletes if you like.
The pond wondered why The New Yorker would publish a clueless writer pandering to a clueless old academic pandering to clueless Fox News viewers, and the answer of course was that it was a clueless lawyer ...
Jeannie Suk Gersen is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Law School.
Now nobody at The New Yorker is going to read this and no one will care, but when Gersen rounded out her rant with this, Unless we conscientiously and mindfully pull away from that path, academic freedom—which is essential to fulfilling a university’s purpose—will meet its destruction, she went deep into the valley of irony.
She might have conscientiously and mindfully minded what the aged clueless prof was saying, and at least inserted a cautionary note, a cavil, a footnote, a hint, a nuance, that suggested things might be a little more complex than the prof had suggested while pandering to Faux Noise viewers.
The pond has noted of late that standards at The New Yorker have been slipping, but it's always been prone to dodginess.
Back in the 1930s, Janet Flannery did a series of wildly ambivalent profiles of Hitler, such as this one in the 29th February 1936 edition, which can serve as a cautionary tale in lieu of a cartoon ... (though you get a couple of vintage ones anyway) ...
That's just not science, is it: as we all know, every single 'scientist' must be 100% correct and accurate about every aspect of science 100% of the time. Just like Lloydy is.
ReplyDeleteMike take a little while to absorb all of that Mein Fuhrer stuff, though.
It’s that time again - to inflict on us Ms Marohasy’s supposed thesis on reading temperature at a BOM station every 1 second, and, as has long been the method, every 300 seconds. I find I have mentioned this every few months; the readings taken at the electric probe at one second intervals will not align with those read every 300 seconds from a mercury column. The statistical expectation should be that about 100 will be greater, 100 less, and 100 within the observational range. The weird finding would be that all the readings from the electric probe were within the observational range of the mercury - and flipped over every half hour. Now THAT would be something to investigate.
ReplyDeleteThere is a much more interesting hypothesis emerging from now at least a quarter of a century of observation of the Amazon. It started with serious examination of the dark soils of that area; even as exploitative governments, in the name of ‘development’ were encouraging ragged ‘entrepreneurs to gouge it out and bag it as potting mix.
All the evidence supports the idea that these soils were constructed, deliberately, by humans, a millennium or so back, and that much of their fertility still is down to charcoal prepared within a highly controlled temperature range.
But there is a lot of this soil; who prepared it? More recent research, using laser scanning, is showing what had to have been large cities through the greater Amazon. Put ‘Upano Valley’ into the ‘search engine of your choice’. Estimates of populations of those cities run to a total of 8 million or more, and finer resolution shows that those cities involved extensive reshaping of water retention and distribution in entire valleys, to water the dark soils.
Now - here is the truly interesting speculation. Could it be, that the remarkable Amazon rainforest ‘discovered’ by whitefellas largely from the Iberian peninsula, a few hundred years back, was actually created by human activity? That a couple of millennia of building up soil, and harvesting water, produced the rainforest which, until recently, had become self-generating, including recycling somewhat more than 50% of that rainfall? It is fairly easy to explain the much small indigenous population there now - germs and guns.
I will not hold my breath for Lloydie’s construct on this - I can’t recall him making any mention of the dark soils (‘terra preta’ if you want to be fancy) or any of this other archaeological investigation - nup, the Amazon clearly needs another know-it-all’ whitey to show them what to do.
The human race, as exampled by us Anglo-Euros, is really remarkably ignorant of its own history. We still don't have much idea of, for instance, Catalhoyuk and who built it and why it was abandoned. It's what you get, I suppose, when one's species goes around doing lots of things before having an adequate written record to consult a few thousand years later.
DeleteAnd yes, 'germs and guns (and steel)' can surely decimate a native population very quickly.
Though I don't expect the likes of Lloydy and Marohasy to be much aware of any of that so thanks for bringing it to our attention.
And here was I thinking the trial of the century was Trump’s fraud trial.
ReplyDeleteSounds like Peter Ridd and Lloydie are where Abbott gets his scientism. For Ridd science can only be verified in a court because it is the court system which “guarantees a proper scientific argument in such cases, something that almost never happens in many parts of the wider science community – to our great cost.” Who knew that all medical science needs to go through the courts before we can trust it and what will happen to the science of metallurgy and all the projects dependent upon it if it has to go through the courts. It could take years, although one could take consolation in that it would prove lucrative for the legal profession.
Of course, most conservative governments don’t make rules based on dodgy science, because they scrape the rules altogether.
Shouldn’t the 84 reports from 22 countries that Ridd and Cumming rely upon have gone through the courts first before Lloydie went to print; they could be dodgy science reports.
My understanding is that owls are mostly losing habitat to urbanization and brolgas are threatened due to agriculture as well as loss of wetlands, but Llyod will not suggest returning urban areas to nature or Cumming changing his agricultural practices as a farmer.
(https://www.wildlife.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/91383/Brolga.pdf)
Ooh, I can't wait for the courts to resolve the whole quantum-relativity issue authoritatively.
DeleteAnd the Riddle-me-ree is surely a joy with his "interpretation' of the world, isn't he.
Oh, haveta get Lloydy (and Marohasy and the Riddler) onto this:
ReplyDelete"Australians can look forward to lower electricity bills later this year as a surge in renewables generation helps push down wholesale costs across the national grid, new data has revealed."
‘Undeniably positive’: Electricity bill relief on the horizon as renewables drive down wholesale costs
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/25/electricity-prices-wholesale
That can't possibly be right, can it ?