1 Comment

Journalism at its historical roots, surely, is about keeping a journal or diary about events: anyone able to read and write could do it. Once somebody invented an expensive printing press, however, it started to become something else. https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth/ (Peter Vanderwicken in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1995):

"The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ...

"The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. ... The architect of the transformation was not a political leader or a constitutional convention but Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1883 bought the sleepy New York World and in 20 years made it the country’s largest newspaper. Pulitzer accomplished that by bringing drama to news—by turning news articles into stories ... His journalism took events out of their dry, institutional contexts and made them emotional rather than rational, immediate rather than considered, and sensational rather than informative. The press became a stage on which the actions of government were a series of dramas."

I like this "conspiracy theory" of journalism, because I'm interested in understanding physics, and keep finding conspiracies between journalists and scientists. In elementary physics textbooks on 1st quantization (and about 100% of TV propaganda shows) an electron has a single "wavefunction" amplitude, that's indeterminate until measured, is not correct because of quantum field theory, also known as 2nd quantization (in the form of Feynman's 1947 path integral), shows that particles don't have a single wavefunction. Instead, there's a wavefunction for every possible path or interaction, which have to be added together. But this switch-over from 1st to 2nd quantization debunks the single-wavefunction models, except as "flat earth approximations", yet people are still "using" single-wavefunction "physics" (flat earthers) for "wavefunction entanglement", etc. No journalist will debunk it. Maybe it's harder to explain than nonsense?

The same for climate change. Temperature is rising, and CO2 are rising. But the rise in CO2 is ~26 times too low to directly give the temperature rise, so all IPCC models incorporate a positive-feedback amplification loop whereby water vapour evaporates (triggered by the small CO2 rise) and causes a massive temperature rise (water vapour in the air strongly absorbs infrared radiation in sunlight).

But there's a snag: 71% of the earth's area is water, so if water evaporation causes positive feedback, amplifying climate changes ~26 times, then why isn't the earth in a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus? After all, temperature has varied in ice age cycles in the past, so why didn't the heating cycles of the natural climate change then trigger off the runaway water vapour positive feedback until the planet was boiling, exterminating all life?

Clearly, when that extra water vapour evaporates and then heats up by absorbing infrared, it rises, expands, and condenses into extra cloud cover, which reflects heat away (or absorbs it high above the ground). So you then have to ask: is this in the climate change models? Over a decade ago, none of the 21 IPCC climate change models took account of negative feedback from water vapour. Not surprising, because there's really not much data on the time dependence of atmosphere water vapour (however, see Fig 3 in my paper https://vixra.org/pdf/1302.0044v2.pdf for some data, showing a FALL in water vapour between 1950 and 2000, taken from Fig 9 in https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/E&E_21_4_2010_08-miskolczi.pdf which is still ignored for political reasons!).

So, all the "experts" and their entourage of "journalists" in the climate lobby are really free to say whatever they want about water vapour increasing in response to CO2 increase. They simply ignore the admittedly limited data, which slows a decline in water vapour - which you'd think would debunk the key of their models, the amplification of CO2 warming by water! But they just ignore it.

More recent data shows no significant correlation between water vapour and the hockey stick CO2 or temperature curve, see p21 of https://gml.noaa.gov/publications/annual_meetings/2014/slides/22-140327-C.pdf which is currently the only set of graphs referenced by wikipedia which states at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor#:~:text=IPCC%20AR6%20expresses%20medium%20confidence,per%20%C2%B0C%20of%20warming. :

"IPCC AR6 expresses medium confidence in increase of total water vapour at about 1-2% per decade;[46]"

The problem is what proportion of it becomes extra cloud cover, reflecting back heat into space? "Medium confidence" for such a vital question is pathetic pseudo-science. Science depends on facts.

The same kind of thing is also true of cosmological "dark energy" and quantum gravity in physics. You can find solutions, but you can't get anyone interested unless it is fashionable, which it sure as hell isn't! I think the BBC said about 15 years ago (around the time they put out the Horizon show by Sir Paul Nurse dismissing Delingpole) that it had made a decision that the "science was settled" on climate change. You have to wonder whether this attitude is just politically expedient hubris, and whether the flat earthers also claimed that the science had settled on the accuracy of their 2-d maps?

Expand full comment