from the ♪-I-feel-the-earth-move-under-my-feet-♪ dept.
The Earth Has a Pulse—A 27.5-Million-Year Cycle of Geological Activity:
Analysis of 260 Million Years of Major Geological Events Finds Recurring Clusters 27.5 Million Years Apart
[...] “Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random,” said Michael Rampino, a geologist and professor in New York University’s Department of Biology, as well as the study’s lead author.
Over the past five decades, researchers have proposed cycles of major geological events—including volcanic activity and mass extinctions on land and sea—ranging from roughly 26 to 36 million years. But early work on these correlations in the geological record was hampered by limitations in the age-dating of geologic events, which prevented scientists from conducting quantitative investigations.
[...] The team analyzed the ages of 89 well-dated major geological events of the last 260 million years. These events include marine and land extinctions, major volcanic outpourings of lava called flood-basalt eruptions, events when oceans were depleted of oxygen, sea-level fluctuations, and changes or reorganization in the Earth’s tectonic plates.
They found that these global geologic events are generally clustered at 10 different timepoints over the 260 million years, grouped in peaks or pulses of roughly 27.5 million years apart. The most recent cluster of geological events was approximately 7 million years ago, suggesting that the next pulse of major geological activity is more than 20 million years in the future.
The researchers posit that these pulses may be a function of cycles of activity in the Earth's interior—geophysical processes related to the dynamics of plate tectonics and climate. However, similar cycles in the Earth’s orbit in space might also be pacing these events.
Journal Reference:
Michael R. Rampino, Ken Caldeira, Yuhong Zhu. A pulse of the Earth: A 27.5-Myr underlying cycle in coordinated geological events over the last 260 Myr [open], Geoscience Frontiers (DOI: 10.1016/j.gsf.2021.101245)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @12:09AM
Cthulu awakens every 27.5 million years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @12:31AM (1 child)
That pulse won't amount to a hill of beans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @12:38AM
I prefer peas anyway. Oh - wait . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @01:23AM (23 children)
That the climate changes and you can't do anything about it. Sucks to be a liberal today!! And every day!11
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 21 2021, @02:22AM (22 children)
Nope, what sucks is worshiping rich people while they piss on you and call it trickle down.
Climate's gonna change: true. Are we gonna let the rich people continue to give themselves all the power while they make it change faster for the worse? That depends on your political leaning.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @02:46PM
The wonderful thing is that they've chosen to focus on profiteering off of space travel on top of profiting off of destroying the environment here, so that they'll be ridiculously wealthy either way.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @03:25PM (1 child)
"That depends on your political leaning."
Oh man, that made me laugh out loud. Seriously, you really think that Republicans are all zillionaires and the Democrats are poor downtrodden regular folk that eat beans out of can for supper? Jesuz F!
"worshiping rich people while they piss on you and call it trickle down."
Liberals also worship the rich, no not the rich, the WEALTHY! 7 of top 10 richest members of the house and senate are Democrats. There is a reason Democraps have been nicknamed "Limousine Liberals" for decades-they proclaim they support poor or regular people, but only when it favors their bank account. That is, use regular people to work for them. Let's look at some Dems net worth:
Nancy Pelosi- ~$200M. Owns a dozen houses in the US alone.
Al Gore-$300M.
Hillary Clinton-$200M (didn't think she was that wealthy)
Michelle Obama-$60M
Confused Joe Biden-$40M
These people spend more money in a week than 9-5ers do in a year! And they want to continue doing it! Do you really think any of these rich-beyond-average-wage-earners-comprehension people actually give a flying, flaying, or flapping fuck about you, the environment, or woke crap? Supporting climate change/green deal, free tuition, woke shit are ways for them to get votes from you so they stay in power, keep and increase their wealth, travel around the world at taxpayers expense because suckers like you buy into their liberal lies and bullshit.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 21 2021, @04:08PM
Absolutely not, the poorest dirt in my county votes Republican. They vote down taxes on the rich, and they vote down social services that would benefit themselves - although they don't hesitate to collect every social service they are eligible for, nor to bend the rules a bit to qualify for more.
Your stats seem to be saying: Everybody in power is rich. Thanks for that tip, Captain Obvious. But, is it correlation, or causation?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by khallow on Monday June 21 2021, @03:41PM (18 children)
Well, is anyone doing that?
You have proof that is happening? Last I heard from you was a bunch of complaining about imaginary problems and conspiracies.
Here, we're going to change faster because we have a lot of poor people in the world that are improving their lives. I think that's a good tradeoff - minor climate change for a vastly improved situation for humanity and the environment. If there are rich people profiting off an inherently good thing by helping make it happen, then I'm ok with that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 21 2021, @04:12PM (17 children)
You expect me to be providing you with proof?
Maybe the population of East Moosefucker Idaho doesn't care about what's happening with the climate, the vast majority of the Earth's population does now care, and does now believe the proof that they have been provided, and in rare cases observed / collected first hand and convincingly corroborated with respected colleagues. I have as much interest in changing your mind as I do in correcting "Moon Landing Never Happened" idiots.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 21 2021, @08:39PM (16 children)
Indeed. So you going to deliver or evade?
Nonsense. I doubt there's serious interest in climate change outside of the present developed world. Poor people can't afford to care.
I see we have a new species of unicorn. I've read actual reports from actual climate researchers. And they just don't have that proof you claim exists. So who are these colleagues who are providing your proof? How pearly white are their hooves and horn?
Too bad. You're the moon nut in this thread.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 21 2021, @09:28PM (9 children)
Evade - you win, I have zero interest in playing. Would you like to "beat me" with some flat earth arguments now?
The poor people in low lying countries already care quite a bit. Poor people whose sources of food and water are changing (mostly for the worse) also care quite a bit. Poor people impacted by heavy weather, mudslides, fire, etc. also care. Whether or not all these poor people are tapped into the global consciousness / internet and are aware of the reasons behind their recent uptick in current and near future misfortunes, they do care about the results.
Would these be the actual climate researchers working for BP or Exxon? Read on, indoctrinate yourself in your cherry picked research.
I get the strong sense that it's just the two of us in here. If you have any sock puppets, call them up - might be amusing. Any real people are welcome to chime in as well.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 21 2021, @11:22PM (8 children)
They also care about loopy developed world priorities that impoverish them. That's why those countries pay lip service to the environmental fads of the day, but don't actually reduce their greenhouse gases emissions.
How about the IPCC? I'm about to review the post by the AC next door.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 22 2021, @02:44AM (7 children)
I don't think anybody actually cares about reducing their greenhouse gas emissions - not enough to turn the thermostat 2 degrees toward uncomfortable, if you have a thermostat, and certainly not enough to burn less wood in the winter if that's how you keep warm.
You could also try Google, Wikipedia, or any number of other sources. At this point, you can read pro-anthro-climate-change literature until you die and not repeat the same article twice. The anti-anthro-climate-change literature seems to have ramped down quite a bit after our oil king president W left office, but an abundance of it was produced and promoted, big budgets can do that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @03:01AM (6 children)
Sounds a bit in contradiction to your earlier narrative. And that in turn strikes me as evidence that maybe people aren't taking those climate change claims seriously. Maybe you should look at why that happens rather than merely assume that people don't care.
Vastly increasing the amount of literature won't make it any truer. I get that many people are wedded to the narrative that critics are somehow deeply flawed. But in real science, evidence carries the day, not consensus.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 22 2021, @03:19AM (5 children)
Oh, people care, people want it fixed, but they are not willing to inconvenience or discomfort themselves much - if at all - in the present moment to achieve the goal.
Again, how many people do you know who are unwilling to give up fatty foods, or sweets, or smoking, or any other unhealthy habit before they personally experience the stroke or heart attack that everybody, including themselves, knows they are sending themselves toward?
The why is not so important. The fact that it does happen is what needs management. Presenting people facts, even if they believe them, is not a strong behavior modifier. If we are to give our children and their children a liveable planet, we need to get past these facts of human behavior to effect change.
Peoples' actions are also not an simple indicator of what is or isn't coming.
Yes, it does, and the evidence continues to pile higher and higher on one side of the debate, while being torn down on the other. But, real science doesn't hold real power in the world, politics, consensus and opinions do.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @03:36AM (4 children)
Needless to say, I think you're on the wrong side of this debate for that. We already are seeing growing deviance in the predictions of climate models. They presently are glossing over that by pointing to climate models' correlation to current CO2 levels. But the problem is that the models were tied to accumulated CO2 emissions not present day CO2 levels.
I grant that a century or two hence, we may well see a serious case for climate change mitigation. Well, we can do the mitigation when we need to. In the meantime, there's a lot of important stuff we're doing with those emissions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 22 2021, @11:38AM (3 children)
Yep, just like a stroke victim can stop smoking after their first major event.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @12:52PM (2 children)
Unlike stroke victims, humanity has already shown it can do environmental things when they are shown to be a problem. Just look at the entire developed world for an example.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 22 2021, @01:11PM (1 child)
Untrue on many levels.
My first boss smoked two packs a day, while working for a prominent pulmonary M.D. - knew exactly what he was doing to himself. Had a heart attack / stroke around age 50 and quit smoking cold turkey. Also retired due to major stroke impairment, inability to visually process things in his left field of vision, slurred speech, trouble walking - but he was still "there" mentally.
Define: "do environmental things" - are we talking about cleanup of toxic mine waste? Safely dispose of coal fly ash? How about just keeping lead batteries "out of the environment" after they are used up? Track record around the world, including the U.S. is really poor on that one - even though we have demonstrated the capability to recycle, we still demonstrably lack the ability to execute consistently. Does Texas count as the developed world? We passed on the purchase of some east Texas timberland due to a neighboring superfund site that was taking batteries for recycling and just burying them with a backhoe, for decades.
Just because a small percentage of the pollution in the developed world is properly handled doesn't mean that the developed world has reached sustainability, particularly while a large percentage of the pollution handling that supports society in the developed world is still outsourced to the less developed world.
The great solar power revolution is, indeed, better than coal, but still has a long way to go before it is fully sustainable both in the sourcing of its raw materials and the handling of its end-life wastes.
Roll back per-capita energy consumption to 1940s levels, roll back population to 1960s levels, and with modern technology we really could be 100% clean and sustainable. Neither consumption nor population are anywhere near "in control" and modern technology is nowhere near capable of keeping up with them while remaining clean and sustainable... maybe fusion will finally get here, but a big part of why it's not here already is no doubt due to lack of funding in the past - a political will thing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @02:48PM
Yes to all your questions. As to your last observation, are they still burying batteries with a backhoe at that superfund site? Not much point complaining about behavior that stopped decades ago ( I recall you haven't lived in Texas for a while, plus the superfund process takes a while to implement).
I care about actual pollution not improperly handled imaginary pollution. Actual pollution causes harm, by definition. And I see the "pollution outsourcing" meme. That's pollution by the less developed world not the developed world. Similarly, the blather about "sustainability". These word games should be beneath us.
What's the mechanism for rollback to those unrealistic levels? World tyranny? Engineering die-off?
Or we could move the entire world into developed world status. That works better in the long run for that sustainability of population and environment. We have somewhere around a seventh of the world that has slightly negative native population growth and very low pollution. It's time to look at what works.
Or are we going to continue this conversation some months down the road with you reintroducing those imaginary problems as if this conversation never happened?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @10:15PM (5 children)
Just a few references, write back when you've read these.
USGCRP Chapter 3 2017 Figure 3.1 panel 2, Figure 3.3 panel 5.
IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policymakers 2013, p. 4: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased; IPCC SR15 Ch1 2018, p. 54: Abundant empirical evidence of the unprecedented rate and global scale of impact of human influence on the Earth System (Steffen et al., 2016; Waters et al., 2016) has led many scientists to call for an acknowledgment that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
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EPA 2020: Carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil), solid waste, trees and other biological materials, and also as a result of certain chemical reactions (e.g., manufacture of cement). Fossil fuel use is the primary source of CO
2. CO
2 can also be emitted from direct human-induced impacts on forestry and other land use, such as through deforestation, land clearing for agriculture, and degradation of soils. Methane is emitted during the production and transport of coal, natural gas, and oil. Methane emissions also result from livestock and other agricultural practices and by the decay of organic waste in municipal solid waste landfills.
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IPCC SROCC 2019, p. 16: Over the last decades, global warming has led to widespread shrinking of the cryosphere, with mass loss from ice sheets and glaciers (very high confidence), reductions in snow cover (high confidence) and Arctic sea ice extent and thickness (very high confidence), and increased permafrost temperature (very high confidence).
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2 and declining net anthropogenic non-CO
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CITEREFIPCC_AR5_WG12013
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @02:48AM (4 children)
Much of the rest is just presenting a weak case for the assertion that there is man-caused global warming. I already acknowledge that. It's not part of my disagreement with the climate mitigation case. I had a fuller discussion but it got nuked by computer problems so I'm just going to hit a few cherry picked examples:
There is a lot more to the case for the Anthropocene than some minor climate change. The whole point of epochs are that they are visible changes in the geological record that don't take careful measurements to figure out. Slight changes in CO2 concentrations won't be very visible in the record. Coke bottles will be very visible in the record. So consider the major changes in geology that have accompanied humanity: extinction of many large animals over the past 20k years, the radioactive isotopes of the past 75 years, a sudden deluge of human artifacts, major alterations of terrain and increased erosion, lots of human body fossils that suddenly are there, and so on. The deception is in pretending that global warming and such will be visible enough to be obvious in a future geological record.
There's all this talk of where CO2 comes from, and none about where it goes. This touches on one of the big problems with climate modeling, namely the widespread failure to account for higher than expected CO2 sinks.
They are, of course, merely speaking of AGW (and its related effects like ocean acidification) when they say "climate change", but boilerplate like this hides the deception.
Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. Too bad they're relying on really shifty geological evidence, rather than instrument readings. I believe our understanding of the past is being twisted to fit the climate change narrative.
This is one of the most dishonest parts of your post. No, climate change is not the greatest threat. Poverty is. Every single one of these health threats is directly tied to poor people with poor infrastructure - poor emergency/disaster prep, little in the way of public health programs and terrain modifications to reduce infectious disease threats, lack of good food access, etc. And real pollution is a lot worse than environmental pollution of climate change. Slightly elevated CO2 levels won't give people cancer for a glaring example.
[...]
One cite says we can halt warming by completely halting greenhouse gases emissions (ignoring of course, the economic impact of halting everything that depends on those emissions), the other says it's so hard to remove CO2, that we're likely to see significantly elevated levels of CO2 for thousands of years. Narratives are conflicting. Of course, both predictions are comfortably in the distant future and not at risk of being shown false in the next few years.
As I noted earlier, those climate models on which predictions like this are based are running hot. Perhaps we should take claims like this with serious grains of salt. In addition, we have a huge error in long term climate sensitivity (from 1.5 C to 4.5 C per doubling of CO2 equivalent). It's a remarkable false certain that states with confidence how much the world will warm by, when that much error is present. Let us note that the present day warming is on the order of 1.5 C per doubling with no sign of that long term higher rate that supposedly exists.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 22 2021, @08:08PM (3 children)
Anyone addressing actual management solutions speaks in terms of net CO2 drawdown rates, that is sources - sinks. It's not a problem with climate modeling, it's a problem with cherry pickers who take pot shots at random publications that aren't attempting to do what the cherry pickers are accusing them of ignoring.
It's not deception. Climate encompasses much more than temperature, but a global increase in temperature affects all global climates, often dramatically. Global warming changes the climate.
Well, let's just fix that - right? After all, Jesus called it out two millennia ago - why haven't HIS followers come through yet?
Also, getting hung up on a difference of opinion about the "greatest threat" is certainly looking for an argument where one is not necessary. From the perspective of the perspective of the Maria Island penguins, the introduction of Tasmanian Devils to their island is the "greatest threat" to their survival. You have a lot of sympathy for the poor, kudos. Do you have any solutions for them other than "just don't be poor."? Letting AGW run unchecked isn't going to erase poverty anymore than the 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy did.
Different authors have different perspective and opinion on the problem and potential solutions. Color me reassured. If the whole world is singing one song that's a monoculture with little diversity and corresponding lack of ability to survive a simple challenges. If the "don't worry, be happy, AGW isn't a problem" crowd is all singing the same song, follow the strings to their puppeteer.
After decades of extreme progress, the best weather models can't even predict precipitation on a given day with any reliability beyond 72 hours. If you really need to know if it is going to rain next Thursday, you take information from all the models and synthesize - work up a probability profile - and act accordingly.
Just because the models disagree doesn't negate their value. What we think we know amounts to a probability distribution, and even taking the oil company supported research into account, that distribution is centering on "problems" - huge, expensive problems across the majority of the globe. Expensive: meaning taking productive labor away from other endeavors and tasking it for infrastructure rebuild, food production, security in the face of shifting (often dwindling) resource bases. This isn't likely to help your war on poverty... in places where the resources can't support the (still globally growing at 75m/yr) population, those people will be thrown into abject poverty, starvation, etc. If your solution for the population explosion is to end poverty, you're going to have a bad time when AGW creates billions of new needy and under resourced people.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @10:37PM (2 children)
Given that I was the only one discussing real world CO2 drawdown rates, that makes me the addresser of actual management solutions, right?
But "climate change" as it is used in the cite, doesn't encompass more than AGW (and the related effects I mentioned already). They never talk about other sorts of climate change. Sorry, it's just a propaganda gimmick.
Jesus couldn't fix poverty. We are fixing poverty right now.
The difference of opinion concerns an opinion that is patently false and supposedly issued by an expert.
I think it would. We after all have half a century of that very phenomenon happening - poverty being erased by unchecked AGW causing industry and commerce, making everyone's lives better. While I doubt tax cuts have the same effect, they're probably a modest net positive too.
So my opinion that climate change isn't a big deal is just as valid as those opinions? There's a problem with this narrative, namely that these opinions are about reality. And opinions that more accurately represent that reality are more correct than those that don't (particularly when, as above, they're about the same thing). The reality isn't going to be both that CO2 takes forever to go away and climate change somehow will stop on a dime (on climate time scales), if we do this one simple trick.
On the first paragraph, climate != weather. We're looking at long term statistical averages over relatively short periods of time. There's not a lot of chaotic dynamics to confuse things at this scale. Even the weather people get things right on short enough time scales. Predicting weather six hours from now is a vastly easier problem than predicting it ten days out.
On the first half of your second paragraph, making predictions and then checking those predictions is how we determine the success of a model. We have consistent bias in the entire population of models used by the IPCC. There is something very wrong here which isn't going to be handwaved off with talk about probability distributions. My prediction is that this error will continue to grow. It will also continue to be obfuscated by a waterfall of new models that continue to predict the same long term trends, model the updated past with great detail, and immediately go off the rails when confronted with near future data.
On the latter half of that paragraph, we already have adequate resources bases for the present day world, which includes about a seventh of the world's population in a developed world state. Further, to address your final claim and as I noted above, we have already shown a half century of poverty reduction combined with mild climate harm works. I think we've demonstrated our capability to do this.
Finally, we have global trade and a fair bit of charity too. No place is forced to face this challenge on their own.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 23 2021, @08:14PM (1 child)
You and a few thousand others [google.com].
So, since this singular cite only addresses AGW, the entire body of work [google.com] is a propaganda gimmick?
If you are talking about extreme poverty [ourworldindata.org], then yes... the push of fungible money into rural China and India alone has changed that picture. Whereas in the 1970s those people subsisted mostly on locally grown food using locally manufactured tools living in self-built houses and couldn't afford luxuries like energy from fossil fuels, yes... now there are billions more who participate in global markets, purchase manufactured goods, travel long distances, etc. I don't consider this progress from a sustainability perspective, quite the opposite. Are their lives improved? You might ask them that before assuming that access to more money equals more happiness.
Source? References? What's the time period of your evaluation?
Like the models 10-20 years back that predicted no warming? Do you place any trust in the time lapse photographs of retreating glaciers? The models are wrong you say, but the ice is still melting, but that's not a problem, right?
Hey, if we continue to throw particulate pollution in the high atmosphere, maybe we can create a sunscreen to save ourselves from baking like clams in the sun at low tide.
Take a virtual trip with David Attenborough [youtube.com] and tell me again how our impact on the planet has been mild. I think his proposed solutions are a bit of sunshine blown up the viewers' posterior, but the documentary of change in the natural world over the past century is compelling.
Charity: temporary assistance rendered by people who know little or nothing about the needs of those they are showering gifts upon. It often leaves more net harm in its wake than help.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:55AM
I might ask them, but I would be wasting my time. We already know their answers by their actions. And I see the seeds of a No True Scotsman fallacy since you suddenly are concerned about "lives improved". I can't be bothered with religious woo.
I guess now we're stooping to dishonesty? Nobody has claimed that humanity's impact on the planet is mild. I however have pointed that out that humanity's impact via climate change is much lower than humanity's impact via habitat destruction, resource mismanagement, deforestation/desertification, pollution, to name a few.
Well, if you should have anything relevant to contribute, go for it. But whining that imperfect charity isn't perfect doesn't mean much.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday June 21 2021, @07:12AM (3 children)
They found solid P-values and such, until they realized that researchers tended to date their own events close to previously known ones to increase "interpretability". The academic ejaculation (aka publication) gave way to dearth and inertia until this finding was rediscovered 27.5 Myrs later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @05:07PM (2 children)
Yeah, er... if we look at the actual study, it says this in the discussion:
The last sentence of that quote may be charitably reworded as, "Different authors played with different parameters in their stats analysis software."
This says 26-33 million years, but the authors of the present study cite other studies making this range at least 23-36 million years in possible "statistically significant" cycles. AND they cite "statistically significant" studies that find shorter periods of cycles in the 7-12 million year range. (This present one claims it occurs at 8.9 million year intervals, in addition to their larger 27.5 million year cycle.) How can it be that we can simultaneously have studies that have "99% significance" for a geological cycle with duration X, then another with "99% significance of a cycle with duration X+5," then another, then another...
Notice something about all of these numbers -- first, note that 7-12 million years almost shows a doubling from the smallest number to the largest estimate for the "short cycle." That means basically different studies found almost every possible periodicity to be statistically significant (because a 6 million year cycle could also be interpreted as a 12 million year one). The 23-36 million year range for the longer cycles isn't quite so bad, but given that these studies are tending to often couple shorter and smaller ranges together, they probably are grouping some of the "noise" from the long cycle into the supposed short cycle, or vice versa.
Basically, given the huge range of "statistically significant" results here, it seems this is all the result of p-hacking and inability to understand how statistics work in many cases. We can see this in the present study, where their "method" section uses stuff like:
Yep, in other words, "we just kept playing with the stats package parameters until it spit out a p value less than 0.05."
I mean, they did more than that, but given the context of all of the other random numbers that other studies cited in the article came up with for cycle length, the chances that most of these studies are just statistical artifacts seems pretty high on the face of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @05:12PM
Oh, and to add one other thing, their 10 peaks aren't anywhere close to a consistent spacing of 27.5 million years apart. The time duration between peaks varies from about 16 million years to 38 million years in this study. With that fact alone, re-evaluate for yourself whether this supposed "cycle" is actually meaningful, given that it's more like 27.5 +/- 11.5 million years.
(And while doing so, also remember that they found a supposedly significant shorter cycle at 8.9 million year intervals, so it's not even like there's a regular 16+ million year gap between significant events or something....)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 21 2021, @06:46PM
Because academics are no longer proper gentlemen who would wager the eating of their hat, or other apparel, upon their prediction being found wrong. Werner Herzog was the last one with any actual honour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog_Eats_His_Shoe
Academic "productivity" ranking sites also need to add a flag to your papers, such that all citations count negatively once the "proven false" flag is enabled.
If I think the markets are heading down, and I short, I fucking pay for it when I'm wrong. Why shouldn't others pay for mistakes in their pronouncements. Put their reputation where their mouth is. Oh - now's a good time to buy PMs, I promise you I'm not wrong (but I also promise you that isn't financial advice).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves