Fun with Science

Anthony Watts, of Watts Up With That, smelled a rat when he watched Al Gore’s Climate 101 video - it was part of the 24 Hours of Reality gong show. So Watts decided to replicate the experiment to see what results he would find.

Before we get to that however, let’s note a few important differences between science and ‘climate science’.

In climate science:

• the null hypothesis is, err, null.
• figure out the result that will maximize your funding, even if the study ‘finds’ animals are shrinking or something equally daft. No one will laugh and money will flow. No, really.
• send results for peer pal-review. This is a process by which fellow travelers on the gravy train will give you a secret handshake and verify your findings. With a string or two attached.
• never, ever, give your data to pesky skeptics, and
• call them names if they won’t go away
• profit

In other sciences, it goes something like this:

• formulate a null hypothesis, and an alternative
• study the snot out of it, see what happens
• ask others to study the snot out of it and see what they get
• publish
• die in poverty

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s return to fun with Watts and Gore.

You may guess that Watts discovered Al Gore’s experiment had more to do with video editing than science, because one of those things is hard. And Al’s done it before. To be fair, Al couldn’t find a scientist to help with the hard stuff, but he did find a guy who played one on TV.

Read the whole thing, it’s a thorough effort to replicate the Gore video. For those pressed for time or wondering where the next hottie is, here’s the conclusion. Enjoy:

The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

The design failure was the glass cookie jar combined with infrared heat lamps.

Gore FAIL

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