Month: January 2017

Is the Number of Papers on a Topic a Good Indicator of its Importance?

The Wikipedia entry on “Global Cooling” dismisses the idea that it was the prevailing view in the 1970’s by showing the numbers of papers on cooling versus the number on warming. Does this truly support the author’s claim?

In this post, I describe a fictitious experiment and then draw up a non-complete list of papers that could be produced from the experiment.

I then show a real-life example of this sort of “paper-churning”. Continue reading “Is the Number of Papers on a Topic a Good Indicator of its Importance?”

America Does Not Need Smaller Government!

A familiar rallying cry of the Right is a call for smaller government. This is seen as self-evident and a “good thing” in and of itself.

However, if we look at the most successful advanced economies in the world, we see that most have more government spending as a fraction of GDP than the US (data from “Pocket World in Figures, 2015 Edition, The Economist). Continue reading “America Does Not Need Smaller Government!”

Whatever Happened to the Coming Ice Age?

“Climate Change” is now synonymous with “global warming”. However, in the 1970’s, global cooling was the major topic. Wikipedia now claims that there was no consensus among climatologists about global cooling in the 70’s and that such a consensus is just an urban myth. Is this just an example of Soviet-style re-writing of history to fit current political needs?

Having lived through the 70’s, I decided to check through my sources to see if mainstream climatologists did fret about a coming ice age in the 70’s …

I found two sources:

  • “The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice” by Nigel Calder, 1974, published by the BBC (there was an associated TV series); 143 pages.
  • “The Cooling World” by Peter Gwynne, Newsweek, April 28, 1975.

Continue reading “Whatever Happened to the Coming Ice Age?”