Dr. Matthew Wielicki: “There’s a disconnect between what the science says and what the narrative in the mainstream media is….and what certain ‘activist scientists’ have been pushing.” Other scientists share his concerns. //

Occasionally we are asked why Legal Insurrection features so much science among the articles featuring court cases, legal analysis, and updates on our push-back against Critical Race Theory and Diversity-Equity-Inclusion in education.

While there are many reasons, perhaps the chief one is that true science is being twisted to support political narratives that are destructive, both to our nation and to humanity. For example, the Twitter Files shed light on the degree to which good information from epidemiologists and physicians was suppressed during the covid pandemic. //

Wielicki was born in Poland while it was still under communist rule, so he has a deep appreciation for freedom of speech and personal liberty. His parents worked at California State University- Fresno at a time when professors and students were allowed to have different opinions about the issues of the day.

Another believer in freedom in science is Roger A. Pielke Jr., who recently prepared an exceptional column on ten principles for effective use of math in policy research.

It was his eighth entry on torturing data that caught my eye. https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/against-mathiness-part-2

I don’t know who said it, but there is an old adage that says if you torture data enough, it will confess. Simple methods, shared data, easily replicable, with clear meaning are always going to be preferable in policy settings to complex methods, unavailable data, impossibility of replication with unclear meaning. //

The hard sciences are canaries in the coal mine. If their data-driven conclusions, which should be experimentally reproducible, can be manipulated and massaged to promote ideological and/or political narratives resulting in elite policy objectives that affect us all, then no science (especially, it goes without saying, the social sciences) can be trusted.

If our leaders and our media want us to trust The Science™, then The Science™ must be trustworthy. Results must be replicated, data should be offered freely, and methodology must make sense.

Ultimately, though, I will leave the final word on the leftist march through the institutions—here, of science—to climatologist Judith Curry who confirms the climate “crisis” is manufactured. https://nypost.com/2023/08/09/climate-scientist-admits-the-overwhelming-consensus-is-manufactured/amp/

We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”

“It’s a manufactured consensus,” climate scientist Judith Curry tells me.

She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”

…“The origins go back to the . . . UN environmental program,” says Curry.

Scientist Adelbert Ames created the mind boggling ‘Ames Window’ (1951)

Before we go on, let's be clear: No, we cannot “blow up” tornadoes, just as we cannot “nuke” hurricanes. It’s too complex, not to mention the likelihood of collateral damage.

But in a theoretical world without risk to lives or property, could you do it? I still don’t think so. Noted storm chaser Reed Timmer posted on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend that the “explosion changed the thermodynamic gradients dramatically within the vortex and blew up the Clausius-Clapeyron equation.”

The C-C equation relates saturation vapor pressure to temperature. What is saturation vapor pressure? Vapor pressure is basically just that: What is the pressure of the water vapor in the air? But at a given temperature, there’s a maximum amount of moisture the air can hold. That would give you the saturation vapor pressure. Using C-C, we can determine that as temperature increases, the saturation vapor pressure of the air increases exponentially. In other words, warm air can hold much more moisture than cold air, and the relationship is exponential.

What does this all mean? Theoretically (very theoretically), the heat released from an explosion within the condensation funnel of a tornado would lead to a dramatic increase in saturation vapor pressure, thus decreasing the humidity in the vicinity of the funnel. You’re not adding more moisture to the equation, so all you’re doing is increasing temperature and increasing the air’s capacity to hold water—exponentially. All else being equal, you’ve decreased humidity, and because the air is no longer saturated, the condensation funnel (which you see when the air is saturated) visually disappears.

If the condensation funnel is our visual cue of a tornado and it disappears, then to the human mind, the tornado itself has disappeared. So you can actually blow up a tornado, right? Not quite.

"Simply modifying" Newtonian gravity to have it spread at finite speed does not work if the finite speed is the speed of light. It was attempted by Laplace in his Celestial Mechanics (1799), who found that the planets will promptly fly off their orbits and the Solar system will disintegrate in seconds, unless the propagation speed is 7×106
times greater than the the speed of light. This is because of the aberration of the direction of attractive force due to delay in transmission, see Resolving General relativity and Newtonian mechanics on a computer.

A more sophisticated modification follows from Mossotti's electromagnetic gravity hypothesis: electric attraction and repulsion do not balance each other exactly, and the difference is gravity. In 1864-72 Seegers, Scheibner and Tisserand experimented with applying the velocity and acceleration dependent correction to Newton's law imported from Weber's electrodynamics to the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Around 1900 Lorentz, Einstein's precursor on special relativity, showed that under the Maxwell electrodynamics the Laplacian aberration problem is eliminated because the correction is of the order v2/c2
rather than v/c
that Laplace assumed, so the attraction between masses moving with constant relative velocity is always toward the instantaneous position of the other mass. It is the Lorentz invariance of the Maxwell electrodynamics that cancels the effects of transmission delay to the first order, as Poincare pointed out in 1905. See What 19th century developments contributed to the General theory of Relativity?

However, Lorentz's theory did not work either, and this time exactly because of the perihelion of Mercury. //

Einstein first mentions Mercury in a letter to Habicht in 1907:"At the moment I am working on a relativistic analysis of the law of gravitation by means of which I hope to explain the still unexplained secular changes in the perihelion of Mercury."