Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Scientists discover Nature!
Most of the news in "science" lately has been unremittingly dismal. Raw stupidity run rampant, the same fashionable lunacy controlling nearly all disciplines.
I finally found something to cheer in this item:
Proliferations of jellyfish can show a substantial, visible impact on coastal populations -- clogged nets for fishermen, stinging waters for tourists, even choked cooling intake pipes for power plants -- and recent media reports have created a perception that the world's oceans are experiencing trending increases in jellyfish. Now, a new multinational collaborative study, involving the University of Southampton, suggests these trends may be overstated, finding that there is no robust evidence for a global increase in jellyfish over the past two centuries.Amazing! Unprecedented! You mean there's one change in Nature that is NOT LINEAR? One variable that RUNS IN CYCLES? One phenomenon that is NOT CAUSED BY EVIL KKKARBON? How can we possibly comprehend this? It's beyond all imagining!
The key finding of the study shows global jellyfish populations undergo concurrent fluctuations with successive decadal periods of rise and fall, including a rising phase in the 1990s and early 2000s that has contributed to the current perception of a global increase in jellyfish abundance. The previous period of high jellyfish numbers during the 1970s went unnoticed due to limited research on jellyfish at the time, less awareness of global-scale problems and a lower capacity for information sharing (e.g. no Internet).Seriously, this is pure sanity, and the authors deserve applause for fighting fashion to publish facts. The online article doesn't seem to have graphs or data lists available, so I can't examine the pattern more closely.... but I'll bet $11 that the "decadal" patterns are actually 11-year patterns. As in sunspots. When Nature does decades, she does 11.
Labels: Blinded by Stats, Carbon Cult
¶ 7:54 AM
